Doing activities

To express the fact that you practise activities, you employ mainly " faire" (to do) and "jouer" (to play for sport or games activities). If you use the verb "faire" in this case, the structure of the sentence is:

Subject  + faire + de la + activity (it can be sport or craft....)

Subject  + faire + du (contraction of de la) + activity.

Je fais de la gymnastique.

Je fais du football.

Do you know how to conjugate faire ?

Je fais

Tu fais

Il / Elle fait

Nous faisons

Vous faites or vous faisez

Ils / Elles font

And the verb jouer?

Sometimes, you can use another verb to say that you practice a sport or an hobby like scrap, it is the verb "jouer":

The structure is a little bit different:

Tom joue à la balle

Tom joue au badminton

Have you noticed anything ?

Subject + jouer + à la + activity                                 Il joue au ballon (he is playing at the balloon)

Subject + jouer + au (contraction of à le) +activity      Nous jouons à la marelle (we are playing at the                                                                                             hopscotch)

Here, we use à + an article or a contracted proposition au (à le).

BUT if you play with an musical instrument you use de la or du.

Je joue de la harpe. I play harp.

Je joue du piano. I play piano.

French conjugation sometimes can be complex and it could be very useful to have a guide to remind how verb is conjugated. For almost French household, they have this book called Becherelle. It is very helpful.