Va/Vient/Aller

Can someone please explain what these are and how to use them

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Erwan on June 18, 2011 at 2:24pm

Aller : to go

Va : it's the 3rd person singular of the verb "aller". e.g : il va à la plage, elle va à la maison, on va s'amuser

Vient : it's the 3rd person singular of verb "venir" (to come). e.g : il vient à l'école, elle vient à la maison, on vient ensemble.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on June 18, 2011 at 2:50pm

So firstly, as you're probably aware, in French, verbs change their form, in a vaguely similar way to English and other languages. For example, in English, you would say:

He goes to the cinema every Saturday.

He should go to the cinema more often.

But you wouldn't say:

He go to....

He should goes...

In French, "aller", is the equivalent of "go" in the above case. Technically, this form is often referred to as being the "infinitive" form: if you like, it's the form that has "infinite" interpretations because you haven't added an ending to say which person, whether it's past tense etc. (This is actually not really true: even an infinitive narrows down the possible interpretations, but that was the idea behind the term when it was invented.)

Meanwhile "va" is the equivalent of "goes": it specifies that whoever or whatever is doing the action of "going" must be somebody/something that can be referred to as "he", "she", "it" (technically what is called "third person singular").

The word "vient" is roughly equivalent to "comes", with a similar line of logic; the infinitive form ("come") would be "venir".

One thing that can be a bit confusing for English learners is that English doesn't actually make that many distinctions between verb forms. For example, whilst the "-es" is necessary in "he goes", in other cases like "we go", "they go", there's no difference between the form "go", whereas French would make a difference.