Voir — to see | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 Voir in plain English: seeing, foreseeing and « on verra »

Voir — to see — looks tame in the present (je vois, tu vois, il voit, nous voyons, vous voyez, ils voient) and then scatters irregularity across the other tenses, which is why its verb tables reward a guided read. The futur doubles the r: je verrai (and the conditionnel je verrais — “I would see”); hearing that double r is the difference between seeing and would-be seeing, a pronunciation-as-grammar moment unique to voir and pouvoir/envoyer. The passé composé is j’ai vu — vu being so useful French made it a preposition (vu la situation — given the situation) and a national interjection: « vu ! » (got it). The subjonctif que je voie sounds identical to the indicative je vois — visible only in writing, the sneakiest agreement test in dictées — and à l’indicatif littéraire, the passé simple je vis collides with vivre’s present, a trap every reader of novels meets once. Round the table with the imparfait je voyais (the y returns wherever nous went) and voir’s map is complete — la conjugaison in miniature: stems shift, sounds merge, spelling referees.

Usage is where voir goes from verb to worldview. On verra — “we’ll see” — is the official tense of French planning, deployed wherever commitment is premature. Voyons — “let’s see” or scolding « come now! » — depending entirely on tone. Se voir covers meeting up (on se voit demain ?) and the passive voice by stealth: ça se voit — “that’s obvious”, literally “it sees itself”. The family inherits everything: revoir (see again — as in au revoir, until the re-seeing), prévoir (foresee, plan — the weather verb: la météo prévoit de la pluie), entrevoir (glimpse). And the phrase that ties this chart to the language’s heart: voir la vie en rose — worth learning if only to hear Piaf correctly. Read the table aloud with the audio above, then plan something French and answer every question about it with on verra — grammar and lifestyle, one lesson.