Futur Proche in Depth: Aller + Infinitive

If you learn one French future construction first, make it the futur proche: aller in the present indicative, plus an infinitive. Je vais partir (I'm going to leave). Tu vas voir (you'll see). On va manger (we're going to eat). It is the most-used future in spoken French — far more frequent than the morphological futur simple — and it maps onto English be going to + verb with almost no friction. Once you have memorized the present forms of aller, you can produce a future of any verb in the language.

This page builds on Futur Proche: Going to / Immediate Future and goes deeper: the full range of meanings, the register split with the futur simple (which is more dramatic than most textbooks admit), the negation pattern that confuses A2 learners, the pronoun position that contradicts learner intuition, and a few subtleties — like the futur proche of avoir and être, and the slightly unusual je vais aller — that even intermediate learners get wrong.

Formation recap

The construction is:

aller (present indicative) + infinitive

The infinitive does not change. All work happens in aller. The original meaning of aller (to go) has bleached out almost entirely — je vais partir does not imply physical motion toward a departure, just that departure is in the speaker's near horizon.

The four uses of the futur proche

The construction covers a wider range of contexts than just "near future." Four overlapping uses dominate everyday French.

1. Imminent future

The classic futur proche meaning — something that is about to happen, in the next minutes or hours.

When the imminence is even more pressing — something is genuinely on the verge — French has a stronger construction available, être sur le point de + infinitive (covered in its own page). For everyday "about to," the futur proche is enough.

2. Casual planning

The futur proche dominates casual planning and intentions, even when the planned event is days, weeks, or months away. Distance in time matters less than the speaker's stance toward the action: if it feels planned, decided, anticipated, the futur proche works.

The textbook claim that the futur proche is reserved for "near" future and the futur simple for "distant" future is misleading. L'année prochaine, je vais déménager is completely natural — the year-ahead distance does not push you toward the futur simple. What matters is the speaker's commitment to the plan, not the calendar.

3. Predictions and inferences from the present

When something visible right now suggests an imminent event, the futur proche is the natural choice:

This visible-imminence reading is one of the clearest places where the futur proche cannot be replaced by the futur simple. Il pleuvra is a forecast about tomorrow or next week; il va pleuvoir is the inference you make from the gathering clouds you can see right now.

4. General future in conversation (replacing futur simple)

This is the use that surprises learners most. In modern spoken French, the futur proche has largely replaced the futur simple for ordinary future reference. What used to require a futur simple in 19th-century French is, in 21st-century conversation, expressed with the futur proche.

The futur simple still dominates in journalism, formal writing, official announcements, news broadcasts, and any context where weight, distance, or ceremony is wanted. In friend-to-friend conversation, it is the marked choice — and using it where a futur proche would do can sound stiff or ironic.

Negation: ne...pas wraps aller

To negate the futur proche, ne...pas wraps around the conjugated aller, not the infinitive:

Subject + ne + aller (present) + pas + infinitive

The infinitive sits outside the negation, exactly as the past participle sits outside in the passé composé. The same logic covers the other negative pairs:

In casual speech the ne often drops, as it does in all spoken negation:

In writing or formal speech, keep the ne. In casual conversation, you'll hear it dropped routinely — and you can drop it yourself once you have a feel for the register.

Pronoun position: clitic before the infinitive

When the action involves a direct or indirect object pronoun (or y / en), that pronoun sits before the infinitive, not before aller:

The reasoning: the infinitive is the verb that "owns" the object, so the clitic attaches there. Aller in the futur proche carries no object of its own — it is functioning as a tense marker. This is the opposite of causative faire, where the clitic goes before faire. Don't mix them up.

The same rule applies to reflexive pronouns when the infinitive is reflexive:

The reflexive matches the subject of the infinitive, which in the futur proche is the same as the subject of aller: je vais me coucher, tu vas te coucher, il va se coucher, nous allons nous coucher, vous allez vous coucher, ils vont se coucher.

Negation + pronouns: putting it together

When you have both negation and a pronoun, the order is:

ne + aller + pas + pronoun + infinitive

The pattern is identical to the negation + infinitive pattern in modal constructions like je ne veux pas le faire.

The futur proche of aller itself: je vais aller

A potential source of confusion: aller itself means "to go." So how do you say "I'm going to go to the store"?

The answer is exactly what English speakers expect: the infinitive after aller in a futur proche can itself be aller. You get je vais aller:

The double aller sounds a bit clunky in writing, and French speakers often prefer the simple present-as-future when the destination is explicit:

But je vais aller au marché is also fully correct and very common in speech.

Futur proche of avoir and être

You can absolutely use the futur proche of avoir and être, just like any other verb. Je vais avoir (I'm going to have), je vais être (I'm going to be):

In conversation, je vais avoir, tu vas être, on va avoir besoin are all completely natural. Don't feel you have to switch to the futur simple just because avoir and être have famous irregular futur stems (aur-, ser-). Both options work; the futur proche just sounds more conversational.

Questions

The futur proche forms questions exactly like any other tense — by intonation, by est-ce que, or by inversion (formal). Inversion swaps aller with the subject pronoun:

The t- insertion before vowel-initial subject pronouns applies as usual: va-t-elle venir ? (Is she going to come?), never va-elle.

Comparison with English: a near-perfect match

The futur proche maps onto English be going to + verb almost one-to-one:

The bleached "going" sense is shared by both languages — neither I'm going to die nor je vais mourir implies physical motion. Both went down the same grammaticalization path: a verb of movement repurposed as a tense marker.

The minor differences worth noting:

1. English uses progressive be going to (am going, is going, are going); French uses simple present (vais, vas, va, allons, allez, vont). French has no progressive aspect.
2. No to before the French infinitive: je vais manger, not je vais à manger. Don't insert à. (See the dedicated error page on this confusion.)
3. French places clitics before the infinitive (je vais le manger); English keeps the object after (I'm going to eat it). Different position, same meaning.

A subtler register point: the futur proche feels committed

There is a faint semantic flavor that distinguishes the two French futures, beyond register. The futur proche tends to feel committed, intended, current — it places the action in the speaker's immediate decision space. The futur simple can feel slightly more abstract, distant, conditional — even when the time reference is identical.

This is subtle, and not all native speakers feel it strongly. But it is part of why the futur proche feels so natural in conversation — it is the future of "I'm doing this," not the future of "this will be done."

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Using the infinitive of aller as the auxiliary.

Mistake 2: Inserting à before the infinitive.

Mistake 3: Conjugating the infinitive.

Mistake 4: Putting object pronouns before aller instead of the infinitive.

Mistake 5: Putting pas after the infinitive.

Mistake 6: Conjugating aller wrong in third-person plural.

Mistake 7: Reaching for the futur simple in casual speech.

Key takeaways

The futur proche — aller in the present plus a bare infinitive — is the workhorse future of conversational French. Use it for anything you intend, plan, anticipate, or see coming: imminent events (je vais partir), casual plans even months away (l'année prochaine, je vais déménager), inferences from the present (il va pleuvoir), and ordinary future reference where the futur simple would feel slightly formal (je vais te rappeler).

Three rules to drill: negation wraps aller (je ne vais pas partir); clitic pronouns sit before the infinitive (je vais le faire, je vais me coucher); no à between aller and the infinitive (je vais manger, never je vais à manger). The construction maps onto English be going to almost perfectly — the original "going" sense has bleached out in both languages, leaving a clean grammaticalized future. Once aller in the present is automatic, you have a productive future for every verb in French — no irregular stems required.