Verb + à

Some verbs in French take 'a' after them, or so conventional wisdom goes. In fact, very often 'a' goes in front of a verb. Before demystifying exactly what I am saying, have a look at the following:

Elle a commencé à parler.

In the above sentence, many people will tell you that the verb "commencer" is followed by "a". This is wrong! Instead "parler" is preced by "a". You may not think right now that this is a big deal but keep reading.

Remember an earlier post about how you cannot (usually) use nouns as adjectives in French? We had to convert them from nouns into adjectives by using "a" in front, e.g. une tasse à thé. Remember The We use the same "a" to convert a verb into a noun.

Getting back to the verb "commencer", think about the English word "start" or "begin". In English you might say:.

1. We started the race.
2. She started speaking.

In sentence 2, the verb start is used to refer to a noun. The fact is, in English "start" has to be used with a noun. So, when we get to sentence 2, we encounter a problem because "speak" is not a noun. To conver it to a noun, we add, in this case, "-ing". In French, you have exactly the same situation except that the French language does not use "-ing"; it uses "a".

This is why we never say in French: Elle a commencé parler. That would be like saying in English "She started speak". We need a noun.

Let has look at another sentence:

Le professeur m'aide à apprendre.
The teacher is helping me learn.

Be careful here: in this example, we do not have to use "to learn" or "learning" in English. That does not change anything in French though. Think about the word "help". You can help a person. In other words, the verb "help" is designed to take a noun as its complement. However, "apprendre" is a verb. To solve the problem, we convert it to a noun using "a".

Here is one more example:

A faire ça, c'est impossible.
It is impossible to do that.

You cannot start a sentence with a verb. You have to have a noun or pronoun. Since we wish to start the sentence with a verb, "faire", we first have to convert it to a noun using "a".


WARNING: The word "aimer" breaks the rule about always requiring a noun. In other words, we can construct sentences such as "I like chocolate", which clearly indicates that the word "like" requires a noun. This would seem to suggest that we should say, for example, the following in French:

J'aime à parler espagnol.

While the above sentence is strictly speaking correct, nobody speaks that way. There was, however, as time when French speakers did insist on using "a" for the verb "aimer". The fact is that languages change and thus so do their rules. Usually the changes result in the number of complexities and exceptions decreasing in number. The verb "aimer" is a rare example of how an exception was actually added to a language.