How to read your horoscopes in French

Horoscopes in France are written in the future tense because they talk about what will happen in the future.  I’ll show you how to form the future tense, and the irregulars to look out for.  Then you can have a go at reading your French horoscope.

You can already cope with the immediate future fine because it’s just like English.  But for horoscopes you can use a whole new tense!  It’s the French equivalent of the tense we use when we say we will see or you’ll be sorry.  It’s called the future tense, or in French le futur.

How it works is you take the infinitive, BUT chop off any e that may be on the end if it’s an –re verb – it’s now called the stem because it’s going to be the main part of the future verb.  Then add the right part of avoir.  After that, put an infinitive.  Imagine it like a plant.  The infinitive is the stem and the avoir ending is the leaf on the end.

1.       Choose what you wanna say in English e.g. I will eat your cake

2.      Remember or find out the vocab you need to make it French e.g. I = je, eat = manger, cake = gâteau (masculine), your = ton (because cake is masculine)

3.      Arrange the sentence with the infinitive in place of the verb that should be in the future tense e.g. je [manger] ton gâteau

4.      To the infinitive, add the right ending of avoir present-tense that suits the subject e.g. je → j’ai → ai → [manger] + ai → mangerai

5.      There you go, your sentence is done and you’ve let French people know what you meant! E.g. je mangerai ton gateau = I will eat your cake

Regular verbs are easy but there are plenty of irregulars in French as you know!  It would take up loads of pages to write out the full table (conjugation) of each irregular French verb in the future so I’ll just give you a rule for each one.  These are the fairly important ones, although on aller, avoir, etre, faire, pouvoir and devoir are really important.

 

 

 

Right then, horoscopes

Now’s your chance to test you new skills and find out what le futur holds J.   See what’s in store by visiting www.horoscope.fr.  Click on mes horoscopes in pink on the right hand side.  Then click your sign of the zodiac from the row of icons, and you should get a four-category horoscope of the day.  Here’s my love horoscope for 28 December 2003 :

Vous vivrez des moments passionnants avec votre partenaire. Quant aux célibataires, ils rencontreront une personne au charisme tout particulier... La journée, quoi qu'il en soit, promet d'être originale !

 

Translation: You will enjoy exciting moments with your partner.  If you are single, you will meet someone with a unique personality...Today, whatever happens, promises to be special!

The immediate future – why do today what you can put off until tomorrow

If you wanna say I’m going to be a sixth-former next year in French you say it with the same verbs as you do in English.  You say going to when you mean the action takes place in the future.

In French, that sentence is je vais être un lycéen l’année prochaine.  Just like in English, French speakers use aller to show that the action (in this case being) takes place in the future.  Using the idea of going like this is not actually a tense but is what’s known as a construction.  It uses verbs in forms you already know – the infinitive and the present tense.  This construction is called the immediate future. 

It’s much easier to use it in the oral because you only have to know je vais, tu vas, il va and so on.  Use the immediate future construction as much as you like, but remember to drop in the proper future tense (le futur) a couple of times to show off!