What this is
French has a real future tense. You don’t need it yet, and in ordinary speech people often don’t use it either. What they use instead is the verb you already conjugate — aller — followed by a second verb left in its dictionary form: je vais partir, I’m going to leave.
English does exactly the same thing. “I’m going to eat” is not a tense either; it’s the verb go propping up a bare verb behind it. That parallel is why this construction costs you almost nothing: you already know aller from M9, you already know a few dozen infinitives, and putting them next to each other buys you the entire near future.
The rule
Conjugate aller for your subject. Add the infinitive. Stop.
| Person | aller | + infinitive | |
|---|---|---|---|
| je | vais | partir | I’m going to leave |
| tu | vas | partir | you’re going to leave |
| il / elle / on | va | partir | he/she is going to leave |
| nous | allons | partir | we’re going to leave |
| vous | allez | partir | you’re going to leave |
| ils / elles | vont | partir | they’re going to leave |
Read the third column downwards: partir, partir, partir, partir, partir, partir. It never moves. All six rows differ only in the aller column, because only aller is carrying the person and the number. The second verb is inert — it is not agreeing with anything, and it never will.
This holds no matter how irregular the second verb is. Tu vas être fatigué. Ils vont faire la vaisselle. Elle va prendre le train. être, faire and prendre are three of the worst-behaved verbs in the language when you conjugate them, and here they simply sit there in their dictionary form.
Why it works this way
A conjugated verb is doing two jobs at once: naming an action and marking who is doing it, when. The near future splits those jobs between two words. aller takes the grammatical work — person, number, tense — and the infinitive is left to mean nothing but the action itself.
Once you see the split, the rest of the module follows. venir de and être en train de, coming next, use the identical shape: one conjugated verb doing the grammar, one bare infinitive carrying the meaning. Only the first verb changes, and changing it slides the action to a different point in time.
Edge cases
The infinitive never changes for person or number
Je vais finir, tu vas finir, et nos amis vont finir. Three subjects, three forms of aller, one unmoved finir. If you ever catch yourself writing something like nous allons finissons, you have conjugated the same sentence twice — one conjugated verb per clause is the limit, and aller has already claimed it.
Negation wraps aller, not the infinitive
The negation closes around the conjugated verb, which means around aller:
- Je ne vais pas sortir. — I’m not going to go out.
- Nous n’allons jamais oublier ton nom. — We’re never going to forget your name.
- Mon frère ne va plus fumer. — My brother isn’t going to smoke any more.
English puts “not” between the two verbs — “going not to leave” is at least parseable — so the instinct to write je vais ne pas partir is strong and wrong. ne and pas belong on either side of vais. The same goes for jamais, plus, and rien: they all drop into the slot pas would take, hugging aller, leaving the infinitive outside the negation entirely.
Motion aller and future aller are told apart by what follows
aller has not stopped meaning to go. Both senses are live at once, and only the next word decides which you are hearing:
- Je vais à la gare. — a place follows, so this is real movement. I’m going to the station.
- Je vais partir. — an infinitive follows, so this is the future. I’m going to leave.
Put both in one sentence and the contrast is obvious: Je vais à la gare, et je vais prendre le train. Nobody hearing that is confused, because à la gare can only be a destination and prendre can only be an action. French never needs to disambiguate these because the grammar does it automatically.
What English speakers get wrong here
Putting the negation in the English place. Je vais ne pas partir is the single most common error, and it comes directly from “I’m going not to leave.” Wrap aller.
Conjugating the second verb. Having just spent M3 and M8 learning to conjugate -er, -ir and -re verbs, the reflex to inflect finir into finis or finissons is hard to suppress. In this construction the endings you worked for are exactly what you must not use.
Reaching for a preposition. English has “going to eat”, and the to looks like it should be translated. It should not. Je vais à manger is wrong; the infinitive attaches to aller with nothing in between. (Later you’ll meet verbs that genuinely do demand à or de before an infinitive — commencer à, essayer de — but aller is not one of them.)
Overusing the time marker. bientôt, demain, la semaine prochaine and ce week-end are useful, but the construction is already future on its own. Je vais partir needs no demain attached to be understood as upcoming.