What this is
aller (to go) and venir (to come) are two of the most-used verbs in French, and neither follows any pattern taught so far. They don’t behave like -er, -ir, or -re verbs — they’re irregular on their own terms, and you simply have to learn their six forms as a set. The payoff is immediate: once these two are solid, the next module builds two of the most useful constructions in the language directly on top of them — “aller + infinitive” for the near future, and “venir de + infinitive” for the recent past.
The rule
| aller (to go) | venir (to come) | |
|---|---|---|
| je | vais | viens |
| tu | vas | viens |
| il / elle / on | va | vient |
| nous | allons | venons |
| vous | allez | venez |
| ils / elles | vont | viennent |
Neither verb’s singular forms look anything like the infinitive. aller’s je/tu/il forms (vais, vas, va) share nothing with “aller” at all — it’s borrowed its present tense from an entirely different, extinct verb root, which is why no amount of pattern-matching from the infinitive will get you there. venir is a little kinder: its whole family of -enir verbs (tenir, devenir, revenir, and others not yet taught) conjugates the same way, so learning this shape now is an investment that pays off repeatedly later.
Look at venir’s shape closely. je/tu/il/ils all build on one stem — vien- — while nous/vous build on a shorter one — ven-. This “boot” shape, where the four person-forms that aren’t nous/vous share a stem and nous/vous branch off on their own, will reappear in the very next module with pouvoir, vouloir, and devoir. Recognizing it here means you’re not starting from zero there.
Both verbs pair naturally with a place using à (going to) or de (coming from): aller à l’école, venir de la plage. These prepositions fuse with the definite article exactly the way they already do everywhere else in the course — à + le → au, à + les → aux, de + le → du, de + les → des — but à + la, à + l’, de + la, and de + l’ never fuse; they just sit as two words.
Why it works this way
French inherited several verbs — aller among them — that patched together forms from more than one Latin ancestor because the original verb’s forms were awkward to pronounce or had collided with other words. aller literally has no single Latin parent: its imperative and infinitive come from one source, its future comes from another, and its present tense (vais, vas, va, vont) comes from a third. That’s an extreme case, but it’s why memorizing this paradigm as its own object — rather than trying to derive it — is the only real strategy.
venir’s boot pattern has a more regular logic: the stressed syllable (the one that gets emphasized in speech) pulls the vowel one way in je/tu/il/ils, and the unstressed syllable in nous/vous keeps a plainer vowel. That’s a pattern French repeats across dozens of irregular verbs, which is exactly why pouvoir/vouloir/devoir will feel familiar once you’ve internalized it here.
Edge cases
aller shares no stem with its own infinitive
vais, vas, va, and vont look like they could belong to a different verb entirely — and historically, they nearly do. There’s no shortcut here: these four forms (allons and allez are the only ones that resemble “aller”) have to be memorized directly rather than derived from a rule.
venir’s boot pattern previews an entire family
viens, viens, vient, and viennent all sit on the stem vien-; venons and venez sit on ven-. This exact split — one stem for je/tu/il/ils, another for nous/vous — belongs to a whole family of -enir verbs (tenir, devenir, revenir) that the course hasn’t reached yet, and to pouvoir, vouloir, and devoir, which are next. Learning to spot this shape now means the next several irregular verbs will feel like variations on a theme rather than four more things to memorize from scratch.
What English speakers get wrong here
The most common mistake is trying to regularize aller — reaching for “j’alle” or “j’allons” by analogy with -er verbs, because aller looks like one on paper. It isn’t. There is no regular fallback here; vais, vas, va, allons, allez, vont simply have to be known.
The second is fusing à or de with la or l’ the way English speakers expect prepositions to behave — writing “à la” as one word, or worse, trying to contract it the way au and du contract. Only le and les ever fuse with à or de. la and l’ never do, in any circumstance.
The third is forgetting that a possessive blocks the contraction entirely. à son travail is correct; à le travail was never grammatical to begin with (that’s what son replaces), so there’s nothing to contract. The rule “à + le → au” only applies when le is actually present as the definite article — a possessive determiner isn’t the definite article, even though it sits in the same slot.