Hello everyone! Bonjour tout le monde. 💛

Welcome back to the French Made Easy podcast. This is episode 174 — numéro 174 !

Today, we’re continuing our conjugation series in the imperfect tense, or l’imparfait, in French. And this time, we’re learning how to conjugate one of the most useful verbs in French: the verb “faire” — to do or to make.

We've already learned how to conjugate the verb "faire" (to do/make) in the present tense back in episode 24, and in the future tense in episode 109. So if you haven't listened to those yet, I recommend checking them out.

As always, if you’re new to the podcast — welcome ! Make sure you have your lesson’s cheat sheet ready so you can follow along with the spelling of the words as you listen. And don’t forget, after this episode, you can practice what you’ve learned with exercises from the French Made Easy Exercise Library. You’ll find all the links in the episode notes — it’s free!

We talked about in the previous episodes on the imperfect tense— but just to give you a reminder: the imperfect tense is used to describe past habits, ongoing actions, or situations in the past.

For example:

• Quand je vivais seul(e), je regardais la télé tous les soirs. (When I was living on my own, I used to watch TV every evening.)
• Il faisait très froid l’hiver dernier. (It was very cold last winter.)

Let’s learn how to conjugate “faire” in the imperfect tense. Please repeat after me.

Please repeat after me:

• je faisais (I was doing / I used to do)
• tu faisais (you were doing / you used to do)
• il / elle faisait (he / she was doing)
• on faisait (we were doing)
• nous faisions (we were doing)
• vous faisiez (you were doing)
• ils / elles faisaient (they were doing)

Now, let’s practice with some example sentences:

• Le week-end, je faisais souvent des gâteaux avec ma mère. (On the weekend, I often used to bake cakes with my mum.)
• À l’école, tu faisais toujours tes devoirs à la dernière minute ! (At school, you always did your homework at the last minute!)
• Quand on était en vacances, il faisait le petit-déjeuner tous les matins. (When we were on holiday, he made breakfast every morning.)
• À l’époque, on faisait souvent la fête ensemble. (Back then, we used to party a lot together.)
• Nous faisions beaucoup de randonnée en été. (We often used to go hiking in the summer.)
• Vous faisiez quoi quand il n’y avait pas Internet ? (What did you used to do when there was no Internet?)
• Elles faisaient toutes les deux du théâtre au lycée. (They both did drama in high school.)

Quick Recap’:

• je faisais
• tu faisais
• il / elle faisait
• on faisait
• nous faisions
• vous faisiez
• ils / elles faisaient

Et voilà ! That wraps up our lesson on the imperfect tense of “faire”.

Make sure you download the cheat sheet to review today’s conjugation, and head over to the Exercise Library to get some extra practice. The exercises really help to make sure that what you learn stick — so don’t skip them!

Thanks for listening, and I’ll chat with you next week.

À bientôt, bye! 🖤