Learn French: Je gagne du temps en faisant plusieurs tâches en même temps. - I save time by doing several tasks at the same time.

Je gagne du temps en faisant plusieurs tâches en même temps.

I save time by doing several tasks at the same time.

Breakdown of Je gagne du temps en faisant plusieurs tâches en même temps.

Questions & Answers about Je gagne du temps en faisant plusieurs tâches en même temps.

Doesn't gagner usually mean "to win" or "to earn"?

Yes! But in French, when talking about time, gagner du temps is a set phrase that means "to save time." You can think of it as "earning" yourself some extra time. Note that if you want to say "to save money," you would use économiser de l'argent, not gagner.

Why does the sentence use en faisant to say "by doing"?

This is the gérondif! You use the word en followed by a verb ending in -ant to talk about the method or how you do something. Here, the method for saving time is doing multiple tasks. In English, this translates well to "by doing" or "while doing."

How do we get the word faisant from the verb faire?

To make this -ant form (called the present participle), you take the nous form of the present tense and drop the -ons. For faire, the nous form is faisons. Drop the -ons, add -ant, and you get faisant.

The word en appears twice: en faisant and en même temps. Are they doing the same job?

Not quite! In en faisant, en is part of the gérondif grammar structure meaning "by" or "while." In en même temps, it is just a normal preposition used in a fixed phrase. En même temps is a very common expression that always means "at the same time."