Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 2

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

Accepted Answer

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."

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

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.

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

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."

Question 5

Why is there no article like des before plusieurs tâches?

Accepted Answer

The word plusieurs, which means "several," already acts as the article here. Just like you wouldn't normally say "the several tasks" in English, in French you put plusieurs directly in front of the plural noun without adding les or des.

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

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