Talking about your activities in French
Often, people ask you what are your hobbies, what do you do during your spare time. Good news! This post will be very helpful for that. When talking about your activities, playing a sport or an instrument, in order to make it simple and effective, you’ll need the following ingredients:
The verbs Faire and Jouer
Vocabulary for activities
A few formulas to bring it all together
The verbs
The two verbs we’ll be using are Faire (to do) and Jouer (to play). To make things easy, I’ve created a practice module for you on Quizlet. There, you will find the conjugation for both Faire and Jouer along with some listening comprehension questions and games.
Faire de la natation.
Vocabulary
To continue, you need to know the vocabulary for the activity (or activities) you would like to talk about. In French, activities have a plural/singular form and a gender, either masculine or feminine. “A gender!?” you might say. Yes! You’ve heard right (This is French after all… and things work a little differently here) It’s important to remember these key attributes (plural/singular form and gender) because you need them to build your sentence.
Do you play tennis, do you practice piano? Go to the set of vocabulary to pick the ones you want to use.
Activities List - Click here to view a list of physical and musical activities.
Faire: Putting it all Together
Now that we have the verbs we want to use along with our new masculine/feminine activities, we can bring it all together to formulate a sentence. Let’s start with Faire and a feminine activity.
Faire + Feminine Activities
Following the verb faire, you’ll need to use the article de, whenever you talk about playing a sport or an instrument. For example:
Je fais de la natation.
Je fais de la guitare.
To summarize, you can use the formula: Pronoun + FAIRE DE + la feminine activity. Now, let’s see what happens when the activity you are talking about is masculine.
Faire + Masculine Activities
Masculine activities have the article le before it, whereas an activity that is feminine uses the article la. In French, when le follows de you replace the two articles with du. In other words, we don’t say:
Je fais de la football ❌😭
Instead, we say:
Je fais du football ✔ 😎
*Reminder: When an activity starts with vowel or the letter H you must create a contraction between it and its article.
Je fais de l'harmonica; Je fais de l’athlétisme
Jouer: Putting it all Together
Jouer + Sport Activity
With the verb Jouer, your article changes depending on the activity. If you’re talking about sports, you would use the article à after the verb like so:
Jouer + à la + feminine sport = Je joue à la pétanque.
Jouer + aux (à + les) = Je joue aux échecs.
Jouer + au (à + le) + masculine sport = Je joue au football or Je joue au golf.
Jouer + Instruments
When talking about the use of instruments, you use the article de after the verb.
Jouer + de la + feminine instrument = Je joue de la clarinette.
Jouer + du (de + le) + masculine instrument = Je joue du saxophone.
Jouer + des (de + les) = Je joue des percussions.
*Note: Board games and card games are in the sports category.
As an added bonus, I’ve created a YouTube video lesson about the verb Faire, which you can find here. I recommend that you check it out to learn more.
Let me know in the comments below the activities that you love to do.
Ce que vous faites pendant votre temps libre.