Le Présent: Faire (to do, to make)

Faire ("to do" or "to make") is the Swiss Army knife of French verbs. Frequency lists routinely place it in the top five most-used verbs in the language, alongside être, avoir, aller, and dire. It carries the literal sense of "do" and "make," but it also covers weather (il fait beau), sports and hobbies (faire du tennis), cleaning and chores (faire la vaisselle), causation (faire faire = have something done), distance and duration (ça fait trois kilomètres), and dozens of fixed idioms (faire attention, faire la queue, faire semblant). You cannot speak French for ten minutes without using it.

This page covers the present-tense paradigm — including its two famous pronunciation traps — and surveys the most useful collocations and constructions.

The full paradigm

The two pronunciation traps

Faire hides two of the most counter-intuitive pronunciations in everyday French. Both occur in plural forms, and missing them is one of the surest ways to sound like a beginner.

Trap 1: nous faisons /fəzɔ̃/, not /fɛzɔ̃/

The spelling faisons would lead you to expect /fɛzɔ̃/ — the same /ɛ/ vowel as in je fais /fɛ/. It is not. The ai in faisons is reduced to the schwa /ə/, giving /fəzɔ̃/. The same applies to the imperfect (je faisais /fəzɛ/, nous faisions /fəzjɔ̃/) and the present participle (faisant /fəzɑ̃/).

This is the only spot in the language where ai is consistently pronounced /ə/. Historically the spelling froze before the vowel reduced — the modern pronunciation reflects centuries of phonetic change that the orthography never caught up with.

Trap 2: vous faites, not vous faisez

You might expect vous fais-ez by analogy with vous parl-ez, vous chant-ez, vous regard-ez. Instead, French uses vous faites /vu fɛt/, with the irregular ending -tes and a different stem.

This -tes ending is exclusive to a closed group of three verbs:

• vous êtes /vu‿zɛt/ — you are
• vous faites /vu fɛt/ — you do
• vous dites /vu dit/ — you say

These are the only verbs in the entire language where the vous form ends in -tes. Among the compounds of dire, only redire keeps the -tes ending (vous redites); the others (contredire, prédire, médire, interdire) regularize to -disez (e.g., vous contredisez, vous interdisez). Compounds of faire (refaire, défaire, satisfaire) all keep -faites (vous refaites, vous défaites, vous satisfaites).

Use 1: Literal "do" and "make"

The most basic uses of faire cover what English splits between do and make. French collapses the two:

There is no general rule for when English splits do/make and French uses just faire — fortunately, you do not need one. Faire covers both, and you almost never have to choose.

Use 2: Weather — il fait + adjective/noun

Weather in French uses faire with an impersonal il — never a real subject. The pattern is il fait + [adjective or noun]:

A critical contrast for English speakers: weather uses faire (il fait chaud), but personal sensation uses avoir (j'ai chaud). They are different verbs in French, even though English uses "it's hot" / "I'm hot" with the same verb be.

Use 3: Faire + sport / activity

For sports, hobbies, and creative activities, French uses faire de + partitive — almost never jouer (which is reserved for ball sports and instruments specified individually). The de contracts with the article:

Use 4: Faire + chore / household task

Domestic chores are nearly all faire expressions:

Use 5: High-frequency idioms

Beyond the categories above, faire powers a long list of fixed idioms that any A1–A2 learner needs:

Use 6: Faire + duration / distance

To express how long something has lasted or how much distance separates two points, French uses an impersonal ça fait:

The ça fait + duration + que pattern is one of the standard ways French expresses ongoing situations — equivalent to English "it's been X amount of time since." See the depuis / il y a / ça fait page for the full comparison.

Use 7: Causative — faire + infinitive

The causative faire construction lets you express having someone else perform an action. The pattern is faire + infinitive (+ agent):

This is one of the most distinctive constructions in French, and it has no neat single-word English equivalent — English uses have someone do, make someone do, get something done. The dedicated Faire Causative page covers it in depth.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Saying /nu fɛzɔ̃/ instead of /nu fəzɔ̃/.

Mistake 2: Saying vous faisez instead of vous faites.

Mistake 3: Using être instead of faire for weather.

Mistake 4: Confusing il fait chaud (weather) with j'ai chaud (sensation).

Mistake 5: Using jouer where French wants faire for sports.

(Jouer à works for ball sports — jouer au foot, jouer au tennis, jouer au basket — and jouer de for instruments — jouer du piano — but faire is the broader, safer choice and is fully natural for both: faire du foot, faire du piano.)

Mistake 6: Translating "I make" with two different French verbs.

Some collocations look like they should use faire but use a different verb. The most famous: prendre une décision ("make a decision") — never faire une décision. See Prendre.

Key takeaways

Faire is irregular, ubiquitous, and covers an enormous semantic range. The two pronunciation traps (nous faisons /fəzɔ̃/, vous faites with -tes) are mandatory — they appear in every native speaker's pronunciation. The verb's productivity in collocations means that learning faire well is really about learning the dozens of fixed expressions it forms: weather (il fait beau), sports (faire du sport), chores (faire la vaisselle), and idioms (faire attention, faire la queue, faire semblant). The conjugation pays back its memorization cost on the very first day you use it.