French le Futur SimpleTense

One of the ways to express the future tense in French is to use the simple future tense, called le futur simple. This tense is basically the equivalent of “will + [verb]” in English, as in “I will graduate next year,” where “will graduate” is the verb “graduate” in the future tense. This is one of the easier conjugations in the French language, and learning it is simply a matter of learning how to form the stems, and a single list of endings.

Forming le futur simple is quite easy, especially compared to some of the other verb tenses. A French verb in le futur simple needs two things: a base (sometimes called a stem or a root) and an ending. For the bases, we’ll start by looking at the three classes of regular verbs in French. For –er and –ir verbs, all you do is use the infinitive form of the verb, so you can just leave it in the ­–er or –ir form. For –re verbs, all you do is remove the –e at the end, meaning that it will change from ­­­­­–re to just –r. Let’s look at some examples of bases:

As you can see, forming the bases for verbs in le futur simple is not difficult at all, so long as you know the infinitive. The next part that you need for this tense is the ending. The endings do not change depending on the verb you’re using; they only change depending on who the subject of the phrase is. The endings are loosely based on the verb avoir in present tense, and they are as follows:

Subject Ending

je -ai

tu -as

il/elle/on -a

nous -ons

vous -ez

ils/elles ­ -ont

Alright, now that you can form the base for a verb in le futur simple and know which ending to use with each subject, let’s look at an example of each regular verb type.

Voyager (-er verb) Finir (-ir verb) Attendre (-re verb)

je voyagerai je finirai j’attendrai

tu voyageras tu finiras tu attendras

il voyagera elle finira on attendra

nous voyagerons nous finirons nous attendrons

vous voyagerez vous finirez vous attendrez

ils voyageront elles finiront elles attendront