How to Conjugate "Visiter" (to Visit) in French

The French verb visiter means "to visit," and it's a relatively easy word to remember because it resembles its English counterpart. When you want to use it in the present, past, or future tenses, you will need to conjugate it. 

How to Conjugate Visiter​

If you have studied many French verbs, you've likely come across a number that are regular -er verbs as this is a very common conjugation pattern. Visiter falls into this category, so you can apply the same endings you learned for similar verbs to this one.

The first step in any verb conjugation is identifying the verb stem. In this case, that is visit-. As you work through the conjugations, various endings will be added to indicate which tense the verb is used in.

The indicative verb mood is used most often in French. You will use it for the basic conjugations of visiter in the present, future, and imperfect (past) tenses. All you need to do is study the chart and find the correct form that matches both the subject pronoun and the tense. For instance, "I am visiting" is je visite and "we will visit" is nous visiterons.

Visiter and the Present Participle

When you add the ending -ant to the stem of visiter you form the present participle. The result is the word visitant. It can become an adjective, gerund, or noun as well as a verb depending on the context of the sentence.

Visiter in the Past Tense

Another common way to form the past tense of visiter is to use the passé composé. This requires a simple construction using the auxiliary verb avoir and the past participle visité. For example, "I visited" is j'ai visité and "we visited" is nous avons visité.

More Conjugations of Visiter

There are a few other conjugations of visiter that you may encounter as your French fluency increases. For instance, the subjunctive verb mood is used when the action of visiting is uncertain. Similarly, the conditional verb mood is used when the action is dependent on something else occurring.

It is likely that you'll only find the passé simple and imperfect subjunctive forms in French writing. However, it's good to be able to at least recognize them.

When you want to use visiter in short sentences, the imperative verb mood can be used. For this, you do not have to include the subject pronoun. Instead of tu visite, you can use visite.