French I

The French for "they speak" is written ils parlent and said "eel PARL". Ten letters, and four of them make no sound at all: the s of ils, and the e, the n and the t at the end of parlent. That is not a trick or an accident. It is the single most useful fact about French spelling, and once you see what those silent letters are doing there, French stops looking like a language that is hiding something.

Before anything else, an honest warning about this course. You are reading it. Nobody is speaking it. Every sound below is described in words and compared to English, which is the best a page can do, and it is genuinely useful: you will learn what the spelling predicts about the sound, which is most of the battle in French. But you cannot hear these lessons and they cannot hear you, so your listening and your accent are not being tested here. Get audio somewhere. TV5Monde and RFI both publish free graded listening for beginners, and ten minutes a day of hearing the language will do work that no amount of reading can.

Why the spelling and the sound drifted apart

French is Latin that kept changing after the Romans left, and for a long stretch of the Middle Ages the ends of words were pronounced much as they were written. Then, roughly between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries, speakers stopped sounding most final consonants. The spelling did not follow, partly because printing had already frozen it and partly because scholars liked spellings that showed a word's Latin parentage. The Académie française published its first dictionary in 1694 and set the shapes harder still.

So a written French word is roughly a photograph of how it sounded several hundred years ago. That sounds like a nuisance. It is actually a gift, because the silent letters carry information the sound has lost. Petit (small) keeps a t you do not say, but the feminine petite says it, and so does petitesse (smallness). The silent s on les amis (the friends) is inaudible on its own and audible the moment the next word begins with a vowel. Silent letters in French are not dead. They are asleep.

Key idea: a French word's spelling tells you about its grammar and its relatives, not only about its sound. Read the extra letters as information rather than as noise.

The alphabet: the same twenty-six letters, different names

French uses exactly the letters English uses. The names are different, and you need them the first time you have to spell a surname or an email address out loud.

Letter	Name	Letter	Name	Letter	Name
a	a	j	ji	s	esse
b	bé	k	ka	t	té
c	cé	l	elle	u	u
d	dé	m	emme	v	vé
e	e	n	enne	w	double vé
f	effe	o	o	x	iks
g	gé	p	pé	y	i grec
h	ache	q	ku	z	zède
i	i	r	erre

Two names are worth a second look. W is called double vé, a double v and not a double u, which tells you something about how French sees the letter: it is a borrowed guest, used almost only in words taken from other languages such as wagon (railway carriage) and week-end. And y is i grec, "Greek i", because that is where it came from.

To ask how something is written, you say Comment ça s'écrit ? (How is that spelled?). To spell a double letter you say deux (two) first: Anne is "a, deux enne, e". Note the space before the question mark. French typography puts a thin space in front of the double punctuation marks ?, !, : and ;, and you will see it in anything printed in France.

The five accents, and the letter that is two letters

Accents in French are part of the spelling. Leaving one off is a spelling mistake exactly as leaving off a letter would be.

Accent	Written	What it does	Example
accent aigu	é	Only ever on e. Makes a closed, bright vowel, roughly the ay of English say but without the glide at the end.	été (summer), café (coffee), école (school)
accent grave	è, à, ù	On e it opens the vowel, like the e of bed. On a and u it changes nothing about the sound and only separates two words that would otherwise look identical.	père (father), à (to, at), où (where)
accent circonflexe	â, ê, î, ô, û	Usually the ghost of a lost s. Sometimes lengthens or closes the vowel.	hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest), île (island)
tréma	ë, ï, ü	Says: pronounce this vowel separately from the one before it, do not blend them.	Noël (Christmas), naïf (naive), maïs (sweetcorn)
cédille	ç	Only ever under c, and only before a, o or u. Keeps the c soft, as an s.	français (French), garçon (boy), leçon (lesson)

The circumflex is worth dwelling on because it is a small history lesson sitting in the middle of a word. Say the English word next to each of these and the missing s appears: hôpital is hospital, forêt is forest, île is isle, pâte is paste, bête is beast, hôtel is hostel, coût is cost. The s stopped being pronounced, the writers marked the gap with a hat, and English, which borrowed many of these words earlier, kept the s. When you meet an unfamiliar circumflex word, try putting an s after the vowel and see whether an English cousin appears.

Then there is œ, which is not an accent at all but a ligature: two letters written as one shape. It appears in a small, extremely common set of words: œuf (egg), sœur (sister), cœur (heart), bœuf (beef, ox), œil (eye), œuvre (a work, as in a work of art). Type it as the single character œ when you can. Writing "oeuf" instead of "œuf" is understood everywhere and is what most keyboards produce, but the ligature is the correct spelling and the one you will see in print.

Accents are not decoration

Drop an accent and you often get a different word. These pairs are not rare or literary; they are among the most frequent words in the language, and confusing them makes a sentence say something you did not mean.

Without	Means	With	Means
a	has	à	to, at, in
ou	or	où	where
la	the (feminine)	là	there
sur	on	sûr	sure, certain
du	of the, some	dû	owed, had to
mur	wall	mûr	ripe

So Il a une soeur means "He has a sister", and Il va à Paris means "He is going to Paris". Swap the two and you produce nonsense. One more piece of housekeeping: capital letters keep their accents. The Académie française is explicit about this, so the country is État (State) and the palace is the Élysée, not Etat and Elysee. Many French speakers skip accents on capitals out of laziness or old typewriter habits, and it is still wrong.

The silent final consonant, and the four that usually survive

Here is the rule that unlocks reading French aloud: a consonant at the end of a French word is usually silent. Say these with the final letter cut off entirely: petit (small) is "puh-TEE", grand (big) is "grahn", chaud (hot) is "show", gros (fat) is "grow", tard (late) is "tar", riz (rice) is "ree", nez (nose) is "nay", beaucoup (a lot) is "bo-KOO", temps (time, weather) is "tahn".

The usual exceptions are the four consonants in the English word CaReFuL: c, r, f and l. These are normally pronounced at the end of a word.

• c: avec (with), sac (bag), parc (park), lac (lake)
• r: bonjour (hello), mer (sea), hiver (winter), professeur (teacher)
• f: neuf (nine, also new), chef (head, chief), actif (active)
• l: il (he), avril (April), animal (animal), hôtel (hotel)

Every good rule in French has a short list of traitors, and this one has three you meet constantly. The r of an -er infinitive is silent, so parler (to speak) is "par-LAY" and never "par-LAIR"; the same goes for -er nouns such as boulanger (baker). The c of blanc (white) and estomac (stomach) is silent. The l of gentil (kind) is silent. And running the other way, the s of fils (son) is pronounced, giving "feess", which surprises everybody.

The final e, and what it wakes up

An unaccented e at the end of a word is silent in modern spoken French. But it is not doing nothing, because it makes the consonant in front of it sound. This is the machinery behind almost every masculine and feminine pair you will meet in the next few lessons.

Masculine	Said	Feminine	Said	Meaning
petit	puh-TEE	petite	puh-TEET	small
grand	grahn	grande	grahnd	big
français	frahn-SAY	française	frahn-SEZ	French
vert	vair	verte	vairt	green
content	kohn-TAHN	contente	kohn-TAHNT	happy

Notice what this means in practice. The written difference between masculine and feminine is often a single silent letter, but the spoken difference is a whole consonant appearing at the end of the word. A French speaker hears petite and petit as clearly different words; a beginner reading them sees almost the same word twice. Train your eye to expect the consonant to wake up.

The ending -ent on a third person plural verb is entirely silent, which is why il parle (he speaks) and ils parlent (they speak) sound identical. The same three letters at the end of an adverb are pronounced: lentement (slowly) is "lahnt-MAHN". Same letters, different job, different sound.

Worth holding on to: silent letters in French are grammatical, not decorative. The plural s, the feminine e, the verb ending -ent: all silent, all carrying meaning that the sentence needs.

Reading a word you have never seen: a procedure

Take the word intéressant (interesting) and work it in order.

1. Final consonant: t, not one of CaReFuL, so it is silent.
2. Accents: the é is an accent aigu, so it is the bright closed vowel of café.
3. Vowel plus n at the end of a syllable makes a nasal vowel, which you will meet properly in the next lesson. Here in and an are both nasal.
4. Stress lands lightly on the last sounded syllable, as it does in nearly every French word.

Result: roughly "an-tay-reh-SAHN". Now change one input and watch the answer flip. Add a feminine e: intéressante. The final e is silent, but it wakes the t, so the word ends in a hard "t" sound: "an-tay-reh-SAHNT". One silent letter, and the last syllable of the word changes shape.

Try the same procedure on hôpital: the h is silent (it always is), the circumflex marks a lost s, the final l is one of CaReFuL and is pronounced. Result: "oh-pee-TAL". And on tabac (tobacco, and also the shop that sells it): final c looks like a CaReFuL survivor, but this is one of the exceptions, so it is "ta-BA".

Common misconceptions

• "An accent means say that syllable louder." It does not. French accents change vowel quality or separate homographs; French stress is not written at all, and it falls predictably on the last sounded syllable of a word or phrase. This trips up English speakers hard, because in English the accent marks in borrowed words often do signal stress.
• "The circumflex was abolished in 1990." Not abolished. The spelling rectifications published by the Conseil supérieur de la langue française in 1990 made the circumflex optional on i and u, except where it distinguishes words such as dû, sûr and mûr, and except in certain verb forms. Both spellings are correct. On a, e and o it never went anywhere.
• "If a letter is silent I can drop it." No. The silent letter is often the only thing marking a plural, a feminine or a verb person. Written French is graded, corrected and read for exactly those letters.
• "French h is just silent, so it does not matter." It is always silent, but there are two kinds. The h muet behaves as though the word began with a vowel, giving l'homme (the man). The h aspiré blocks that, giving le héros (the hero) with no contraction. Neither h is ever pronounced; they differ in what they let the words around them do.

Where this leaves us

French spelling records an older pronunciation and keeps the grammar visible. The alphabet is the familiar twenty-six letters under unfamiliar names. Five accents do real work: é and è set the quality of an e, the circumflex marks a lost s, the tréma splits two vowels apart, and the cédille keeps a c soft before a, o and u, while œ is a ligature and not an accent at all. Final consonants are normally silent, except roughly for c, r, f and l. A final unaccented e is itself silent but sounds the consonant before it, which is why petite ends in a t you can hear and petit does not. Take any new word, cut the final consonant unless it is CaReFuL, read the accents, and you will be close enough that a French speaker understands you. The next lesson handles the sounds that have no English equivalent at all.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French orthography. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Alphabet français. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Académie française. Dire, ne pas dire: questions of usage and spelling. Académie française. academie-francaise.fr
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Circumflex in French. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Dictionnaire: recherche par mot. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr

Four French words, all short, all common: vin (wine), vent (wind), vont (they go), un (one). To a French ear those are four completely different words. To a beginner's ear they are the same noise four times. The consonants are almost identical; everything hangs on the vowel, and every one of those vowels is nasal, meaning the air comes out through the nose as well as the mouth. English has nothing quite like it, which is why this is the first genuinely hard page of the course.

Again, the honest caveat: you are reading this. A page can tell you where the air goes and what the spelling predicts, and that is worth a great deal. It cannot let you hear the difference between vin and vent, and hearing it is how you will eventually produce it. Find audio. Both TV5Monde and RFI publish free beginner listening, and this is the lesson to start using it.

What a nasal vowel actually is

Put a finger lightly on the side of your nose and say the English word sing. You will feel a buzz at the end, when your tongue rises to make the ng. Now say the same word but stop before your tongue touches: hold the vowel, keep the buzz, and do not finish the consonant. That held sound, vowel plus nose, no consonant, is roughly a French nasal vowel.

The crucial point, and the one beginners get wrong for months, is that the n or m is not pronounced at all. It is a spelling instruction, not a sound. In bon (good) you do not say a b, then an o, then an n. You say one nasal vowel and stop. English speakers put a little n on the end and it marks them instantly.

Key idea: in a French nasal, the letter n or m is a diacritic in disguise. It tells the vowel to go through the nose and then it disappears.

The four nasal vowels and how they are spelled

Sound	Spellings	Rough English hint	Examples
as in vin	in, im, ain, aim, ein, yn, ym, (i)en	the a of cat, sent through the nose	vin (wine), pain (bread), fin (end), matin (morning), bien (well), simple (simple)
as in vent	an, am, en, em	the a of father, sent through the nose	vent (wind), grand (big), temps (time), enfant (child), chambre (bedroom)
as in vont	on, om	the o of song, sent through the nose	vont (they go), bon (good), maison (house), nom (name), pont (bridge)
as in un	un, um	close to the vin sound for most speakers today	un (one, a), lundi (Monday), parfum (perfume), brun (brown)

That fourth row deserves a note. A century ago every French speaker kept un and vin apart. Today, across most of France and especially in and around Paris, the two have merged, so brun (brown) and brin (a sprig) sound the same for many people. In parts of the south, in Belgium and in Quebec the distinction is alive. You will be understood either way, and you should recognise both.

Two spellings in the first row look like traps and are not. The letters en normally give the vent sound, but after an i they give the vin sound: bien (well) rhymes with vin, not with vent. Likewise italien (Italian) and combien (how much). And ien in science is different again, because there the vowels split. French rewards reading a lot of words aloud.

When a vowel plus n is not nasal at all

This is the rule that makes the whole system predictable, and it has two clean halves.

1. A vowel is nasal only when the n or m ends the syllable. If a vowel follows the n or m, the n or m belongs to the next syllable and is pronounced normally: the vowel stays oral.
2. A doubled nn or mm blocks nasalisation too.

Nasal	Meaning	Not nasal	Meaning
un	a, one (masculine)	une	a, one (feminine)
bon	good (masculine)	bonne	good (feminine)
an	year	année	year (as a span)
italien	Italian (masculine)	italienne	Italian (feminine)
plein	full (masculine)	pleine	full (feminine)
américain	American (masculine)	américaine	American (feminine)

Look at what that table is really showing you. In every pair the feminine form is the one with the extra e or doubled n, and in every pair the feminine is the one where you actually hear an n. That is not a coincidence: it is last lesson's rule about the final e waking up a consonant, applied to nasals. Un bon ami (a good friend, masculine) has a nasal in bon; une bonne amie (a good friend, feminine) has a clean o and a clear n.

The two sounds English speakers keep collapsing: u and ou

French has a vowel written u that English simply does not have, and a vowel written ou that English does have. Beginners hear both as "oo" and merge them, which produces real misunderstandings.

• ou is the easy one: it is the oo of English food. vous (you), tout (all), nous (we), rouge (red), jour (day).
• u is made by putting your lips in the position for "oo" and then saying "ee" without moving them. tu (you), rue (street), vu (seen), sur (on), musique (music).

The trick that works: say "ee" out loud, hold it, and then round your lips into a tight circle as if whistling, without changing anything your tongue is doing. The sound that comes out is French u. If your tongue slides back, you will land on "oo" and you have made the wrong vowel.

Practise on minimal pairs, where the only difference is this vowel: tu (you) against tout (all); vu (seen) against vous (you); rue (street) against roue (wheel); dessus (on top) against dessous (underneath); bu (drunk) against boue (mud). The last pair matters at a dinner table.

The rounded front vowels: eu and œu

One more family with no English equivalent. The spellings eu and œu give a vowel made by saying "ay" and rounding your lips, which lands somewhere near the vowel in British English bird but with the lips pushed forward.

• Closed version, at the end of a syllable: deux (two), bleu (blue), peu (little), jeudi (Thursday).
• Open version, before a pronounced consonant: sœur (sister), cœur (heart), fleur (flower), beurre (butter), neuf (nine).

You do not need to control the difference between the two versions to be understood. You do need to stop substituting the English "oo" or "uh", which is what happens if you read deux as "dooz" or sœur as "sir".

The vowel digraphs you will meet on the first page of anything

Spelling	Sound	Examples
ou	oo as in food	bonjour (hello), nous (we), pour (for)
au, eau	o as in note, no glide	au (to the), eau (water), beau (beautiful), gâteau (cake)
oi	wa	moi (me), trois (three), boire (to drink), noir (black)
ai, ei	e as in bed	mais (but), maison (house), seize (sixteen), neige (snow)
eu, œu	rounded front vowel, no English match	deux (two), sœur (sister)
ill	usually a y sound	fille (daughter, girl), travailler (to work), billet (ticket)

Two of these carry a lot of traffic. oi as "wa" explains the pronunciation of moi, toi, voiture (car) and croissant, which is "krwa-SAHN" and not "kruh-SANT". And eau as a plain o explains why eau (water) is one syllable, said "oh", from three written vowels. Beginners often refuse to believe this. It is true.

The upshot: French spelling is regular in the direction that matters. You cannot always guess the spelling from the sound, but you can nearly always guess the sound from the spelling, once you know these groups.

Common misconceptions

• "The n in bon is pronounced, just quietly." No. It is not pronounced at all. The word is a single nasal vowel, and adding even a faint n is the clearest marker of an English accent in French.
• "French u and ou are the same sound and nobody minds." They are two different phonemes and people do mind, because whole pairs of words depend on it. Saying dessous when you mean dessus reverses your meaning.
• "An accent will fix itself if I read enough." Reading builds vocabulary and grammar. It does not build a nasal vowel, because a nasal vowel is a physical position of the soft palate and you have to hear a model and copy it. This is exactly the part of the course you must take elsewhere.
• "If I get a vowel wrong, context will carry me." Often true, and not a reason to skip the work. French has an unusual number of very short words distinguished by one vowel, and the language leans on them constantly.

Putting it together

French has four nasal vowels, spelled with a vowel plus n or m, in which the n and m are never themselves pronounced: the sets are in, ain, ein and (i)en; an, am, en and em; on and om; and un and um, which most speakers in France now merge with the first set. A vowel plus n stops being nasal the moment another vowel follows, or the n doubles, which is why bon and bonne, un and une, italien and italienne differ in sound as well as in spelling. Separately, French has vowels English lacks: u, made by saying "ee" with rounded lips, distinct from ou, which is the ordinary English "oo"; and the eu and œu family. Finally, learn the digraphs by sight: ou is oo, au and eau are o, oi is wa, ai and ei are the e of bed. With this lesson and the last one you can pronounce most written French approximately right, which is enough to start. The next lesson deals with what happens to all of this when words run together.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French phonology. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Voyelle nasale. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipédia. (2024). Prononciation du français. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
4. TV5MONDE. Apprendre le français: exercises and graded audio for beginners. TV5MONDE. apprendre.tv5monde.com
5. Radio France Internationale. Français facile: news read slowly with transcripts. RFI. francaisfacile.rfi.fr

Written out, Vous avez un ami (You have a friend) is four words. Said aloud it is one unbroken stream, roughly "voo-za-vay-uh-na-MEE", and two of the sounds in it are letters the last two lessons told you were silent. The s of vous has turned into a z. The n of un has woken up and jumped onto the front of ami. Nothing has gone wrong. This is French working normally, and it is the main reason spoken French is hard to follow at first: you are listening for words and the language is delivering phrases.

Two different things are happening

Beginners lump these together, and separating them makes both easy.

1. Enchaînement (linking): a consonant that is already pronounced at the end of a word slides onto the vowel that starts the next word. Elle est (she is) becomes "e-LEH". Il a (he has) becomes "i-LA". Une amie (a friend, feminine) becomes "u-na-MEE". Nothing new appears; the syllable boundary just moves.
2. Liaison: a consonant that is normally silent at the end of a word is pronounced when the next word begins with a vowel or a silent h. les amis (the friends) is "lay-za-MEE". nous avons (we have) is "noo-za-VOHN". The z was in the spelling all along, asleep.

Key idea: liaison is the silent letter of Lesson 1 waking up. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why French keeps writing letters it does not say.

What sound does the liaison consonant make?

Not always the sound you would guess from the letter. Four of them shift.

Written	Pronounced in liaison	Example	Meaning
s, x, z	z	les enfants, deux heures, chez elle	the children, two o'clock, at her place
d	t	un grand homme, quand il arrive	a great man, when he arrives
f	v (only in a few fixed phrases)	neuf ans, neuf heures	nine years, nine o'clock
n	n, and the nasal vowel often stays nasal	un ami, mon école, en avion	a friend, my school, by plane
t	t	petit ami, tout à fait, ils sont ici	boyfriend, exactly, they are here
r	r	premier étage	first floor

The s to z shift is the one you will use fifty times a day, because every plural in French ends in a silent s. Les, des, ces, mes, tes, ses, nos, vos, leurs, nous, vous, ils, elles: all of them produce a z the moment a vowel follows.

The liaisons you must make

Some liaisons are obligatory. Skipping one does not merely sound foreign; in a few cases it makes the sentence ambiguous, because the liaison consonant is the only audible sign of a plural.

• Determiner plus noun or adjective: les amis (the friends), un enfant (a child), mon école (my school), ces hommes (these men), trois ans (three years).
• Subject pronoun plus verb: nous avons (we have), vous êtes (you are), ils ont (they have), elles arrivent (they are arriving), on a (we have, informal).
• Adjective before its noun: un petit enfant (a small child), les grands arbres (the big trees), un vieil ami (an old friend).
• After short prepositions and adverbs: en avion (by plane), dans une heure (in an hour), chez elle (at her place), sans elle (without her), très intéressant (very interesting), bien aimable (very kind).
• In fixed expressions: tout à fait (exactly), de temps en temps (from time to time), les Champs-Élysées, comment allez-vous (how are you), petit à petit (little by little).

Here is the plural case in practice. Il arrive (he is arriving) and ils arrivent (they are arriving) are spelled very differently and would sound identical without liaison, because the s and the -ent are both silent. The liaison z is the only thing telling a listener whether one person or several are on the way. Drop it and the sentence genuinely loses information.

The liaisons you must not make

Just as important, and much less often taught.

• Never after et (and). Un homme et une femme (a man and a woman) has no liaison on et, ever. This is the one absolute prohibition in the system, and it exists because et would otherwise be confused with est (is).
• Never before an h aspiré: les héros (the heroes), les haricots (the beans), en haut (upstairs). Say them with a small break.
• Never after a singular noun: in un enfant intelligent (an intelligent child) you do not link the t of enfant onto intelligent.
• Never before onze (eleven), oui (yes) or un used as a number: les onze joueurs (the eleven players) has no z.

Between the compulsory and the forbidden sits a large optional zone. After a form of être, after a plural noun, after most two-syllable prepositions, liaison is a choice, and the choice is a register signal: the more formal the speech, the more liaisons. A politician giving a speech and a newsreader will link far more than two friends in a kitchen. As a beginner, make the compulsory ones, avoid the forbidden ones, and leave the optional ones alone.

Elision: when a vowel is deleted and an apostrophe takes its place

A small set of one-syllable words drop their final vowel before a word beginning with a vowel or a silent h, and an apostrophe marks the gap. This is not optional and not informal. It is the spelling.

Word	Becomes	Example	Meaning
le, la	l'	l'ami, l'école, l'heure	the friend, the school, the hour
je	j'	j'ai, j'habite	I have, I live
ne	n'	je n'ai pas	I do not have
de	d'	d'accord, beaucoup d'amis	agreed, a lot of friends
que	qu'	qu'est-ce que c'est	what is it
ce	c'	c'est	it is
se	s'	il s'appelle	his name is
me, te	m', t'	il m'aime, je t'aime	he loves me, I love you
si	s' (only before il and ils)	s'il vous plaît	please, literally if it pleases you

That last row explains a phrase you already knew: s'il vous plaît is si il vous plaît with the elision applied. Note that si elides only before il and ils, never before elle: you write si elle veut (if she wants).

The two kinds of h, and why a dictionary marks them

French h is never pronounced. But some words behave as though they begin with a vowel and some behave as though they begin with a consonant, and there is no way to tell by looking.

h muet (behaves as a vowel)	h aspiré (behaves as a consonant)
l'homme (the man)	le héros (the hero)
l'hôtel (the hotel)	la haine (the hatred)
l'heure (the hour)	le hibou (the owl)
l'histoire (the story, history)	le haricot (the bean)
les hôpitaux, with liaison	les haricots, no liaison

The split is historical: h aspiré words mostly came into French from Germanic or later borrowings, h muet words mostly from Latin. You cannot deduce it, so you learn it word by word, and every serious dictionary marks it. Le Robert and the CNRTL both flag the aspirate, usually with an apostrophe or an asterisk in front of the entry.

There is a joke worth knowing here, because it will save you from a real error. Le héros (the hero) has no liaison and no elision. L'héroïne (the heroine) does, because for reasons of pure historical accident the feminine took the h muet path. So the man is "luh ay-RO" and the woman is "lay-ro-EEN". Nobody claims this is logical.

Debug: why you cannot find the word you just heard

A learner listens to a news bulletin and hears, clearly, "ilzonteuunaksidan". They write it down and look it up. Nothing. The dictionary has no entry for anything like it. What went wrong?

Nothing went wrong with the ear. The problem is that the search was for a word and the language delivered a phrase. Unpick it right to left. The end, "aksidan", is accident. The "un" in front of it is the article un, and its n has linked forward, which is why you heard "na". Before that, "eu" is the past participle eu (had), which is pronounced with just the rounded vowel from the last lesson. And "ilzont" is ils ont (they have), with the compulsory liaison z. The sentence is Ils ont eu un accident: They had an accident. Four short words, three link points, one continuous noise.

Why this matters: when you cannot find a word, assume first that you have heard two words joined, not one word you do not know. Cut the stream at the vowels and look for the small grammatical words that cause liaison.

Common misconceptions

• "Liaison is optional politeness, like saying whom in English." Some liaisons are optional and are indeed a formality signal. But the ones after determiners and subject pronouns are compulsory, and skipping them removes the only audible mark of the plural.
• "An apostrophe in French is a contraction like don't." English contractions are informal shortenings you may write out in full. French elision is obligatory: je ai and le ami are simply misspellings, in every register, in every exam.
• "H aspiré means you breathe out on the h." The name is misleading. Nothing is aspirated. The h stays silent; it only blocks liaison and elision.
• "French people speak faster than English speakers." Measured in syllables per second the difference is small. What makes French sound fast is that liaison and enchaînement erase the gaps between words, so a beginner has no landmarks. As your ear learns the linking rules, the speed problem shrinks.

Pulling it together

Spoken French groups words into phrases and then runs them together. Enchaînement moves an already sounded consonant onto the next vowel; liaison wakes a silent one. The letters s, x and z come back as z, d comes back as t, f comes back as v in a few phrases, and n and t come back as themselves. Liaison is compulsory after determiners, after subject pronouns, after an adjective in front of its noun, after short prepositions and in fixed phrases; it is forbidden after et, before an h aspiré, after a singular noun and before onze, oui and the numeral un. Elision deletes the vowel of le, la, je, ne, de, que, ce, se, me, te and si before a vowel, and writes an apostrophe instead. Learn h aspiré words as you meet them, since nothing in the spelling reveals them. Do all this and your French will start to sound like phrases rather than a list. Module 2 puts these sounds to work on the first thing you will ever say to a French speaker.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Liaison (French). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Liaison (linguistique). Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipédia. (2024). Élision. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
4. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Liaison: definition and usage notes. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr
5. Le Robert. Dictionnaire de français: entries marking the aspirate h. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com

French has a verb that means "to call someone tu": tutoyer. It has another that means "to call someone vous": vouvoyer. Both are ordinary dictionary words, listed in the Trésor de la langue française, and both come up in daily conversation, as in On peut se tutoyer ? (Shall we use tu with each other?). English has no verb for either, because English has only one word for "you". Two entire verbs exist in French to manage a decision an English speaker never has to make, which tells you how much that decision matters.

Bonjour is not optional

Walk into a small shop in France, pick up a baguette, and hand over your money without a word, and you have been rude. Not brusque: rude. The greeting comes first, before the transaction, and it is addressed to a person, not to the room: Bonjour, madame. (Hello, madam.) The shopkeeper answers, then you say what you want. On the way out you say Merci, au revoir, bonne journée (Thank you, goodbye, have a good day). This is not formality for its own sake. In French the greeting acknowledges that there is a person there; skipping it treats them as a vending machine.

French	English	When
Bonjour	Hello, good morning, good afternoon	All day until roughly six in the evening
Bonsoir	Good evening	From roughly six in the evening, both on arriving and on leaving
Salut	Hi, bye	Friends and people your own age only; works for both hello and goodbye
Au revoir	Goodbye	Any register, any time
Bonne nuit	Good night	Only when someone is going to bed. Never on leaving a party
Bonne journée	Have a good day	On leaving, in the daytime
Bonne soirée	Have a good evening	On leaving, in the evening
À bientôt	See you soon	No fixed date
À demain	See you tomorrow	You know you will
À tout à l'heure	See you later today	Same day

Two of these catch learners out. Bonne nuit is not the evening equivalent of bonjour; it is what you say to someone heading to bed, so using it to leave a dinner sounds as though you are sending your hosts upstairs. And bonsoir works both ways, on arrival and on departure, unlike English "good evening", which is almost only an arrival word.

Courtesy, and the merci that means no

• s'il vous plaît (please, to vous) and s'il te plaît (please, to tu). Literally: if it pleases you.
• merci (thank you), merci beaucoup (thank you very much), merci bien (thanks a lot, slightly warmer and more casual).
• de rien (it is nothing, you are welcome), je vous en prie (you are welcome, formal), il n'y a pas de quoi (don't mention it).
• pardon (sorry, excuse me, said when you bump into someone or need to get past), excusez-moi (excuse me, to vous), excuse-moi (to tu), désolé or désolée (sorry, with the extra e if the speaker is female).

Now the trap. If someone offers you more food and you answer merci with a small raised hand, you have refused. In that context merci on its own means "no thank you". If you want more, say oui, s'il vous plaît or volontiers (gladly). English speakers go hungry at French tables over this every year.

The point: the words are easy. The register and the timing are the lesson. Bonjour to a stranger, salut to a friend, bonne nuit only at bedtime, and never a bare merci when you actually want the cheese.

Names and introductions

The verb is s'appeler, literally "to call oneself", which you will meet properly in Lesson 16 when reflexive verbs arrive. For now, learn the forms as fixed phrases.

To vous	To tu	English
Comment vous appelez-vous ?	Comment tu t'appelles ?	What is your name?
Je m'appelle Camille.		My name is Camille.
Et vous ?	Et toi ?	And you?
Enchanté (male speaker) / Enchantée (female speaker)		Pleased to meet you
Je vous présente Marc.	Je te présente Marc.	Let me introduce Marc.

Then the question that is not really a question. Comment allez-vous ? (How are you?) uses the verb aller, to go, so it literally asks how you are going. The informal versions are Comment vas-tu ? and, most commonly of all, Ça va ? (Is it going?). Answers run: Ça va bien, merci (Fine, thanks), Très bien (Very well), Pas mal (Not bad), Comme ci comme ça (So-so), Ça ne va pas très bien (Not so good). One useful difference from English: Ça va ? is a real question and a real answer is acceptable. It has not yet worn down into a greeting the way "How are you?" has in the United States.

The tu and vous decision

English lost this distinction in the seventeenth century, when thou fell out of use and you took over both jobs. French kept it, and so did Spanish, German, Russian and dozens of other languages. Linguists call it the T-V distinction, after Latin tu and vos.

Use tu	Use vous
One friend	One stranger
A family member	Anyone serving you or being served by you in a shop
Another student your age	A teacher, a boss, an official, a police officer
A child	An adult noticeably older than you, unless invited otherwise
A pet	Any group of two or more people, always, however well you know them

That last row is the one to burn in. Vous is doing two separate jobs: it is the polite singular and the plural. Speaking to your two closest friends, you use vous, and nothing formal is implied. Speaking to one stranger, you use vous, and the formality is the whole point. Same word, two meanings, and only context tells them apart.

The practical rule for a learner is simple and it never fails: use vous with any adult until you are invited to do otherwise. Being slightly too formal in French is invisible. Being too familiar is not. The invitation, when it comes, is explicit: On peut se tutoyer ? or Tu peux me tutoyer. (You can use tu with me.) The right answer is Avec plaisir (With pleasure) and then you switch.

Usage is moving, and honestly so. Students tutoient each other on sight. Many start-ups and creative workplaces tutoient across the whole company, while a bank or a ministry will not. Online, people under thirty tutoie strangers routinely. In Quebec the boundary sits noticeably further towards tu than in France. None of this changes the advice: as a beginner and a guest, start with vous.

Remember: vous is both the polite singular and every plural. If you are talking to more than one person, the question of formality does not even arise.

Monsieur, madame, and the word France stopped using

Address people as monsieur (sir), madame (madam) and, if you must, mademoiselle (miss). Attach them to greetings constantly: Bonjour, monsieur. Merci, madame. Au revoir, messieurs-dames.

Mademoiselle is now largely gone from public life. A French government circular of 21 February 2012 instructed administrations to remove the term from official forms, along with the phrases nom de jeune fille and nom d'épouse, on the grounds that they asked women, and only women, to declare their marital status. In shops and in the street you will still hear it addressed to young women, and some people find it charming and others find it patronising. Use madame for any adult woman and you will never be wrong.

What a text course cannot teach you here

Greetings in France come with a body. Adults who know each other exchange la bise, a light kiss on each cheek, and the number of kisses varies by region from two to four. New acquaintances, and most men greeting men, shake hands. In a classroom or an office, the greeting round in the morning is a real social event. None of this can be learned from a page: the timing, the lean, the moment you know which one is coming. Watch French video, notice what people do with their hands and faces before they speak, and copy it. That is the half of a greeting no written course can give you.

Common misconceptions

• "Vous is just the formal you." It is also the plural you, in every register. A group of your best friends is always vous.
• "Using tu is friendly, so it will be appreciated." With an adult stranger it reads as either childish or presumptuous. The safe error is the formal one.
• "Bonne nuit is how you say good evening." That is bonsoir. Bonne nuit is strictly for someone going to sleep.
• "Merci always means yes please." Offered more food or drink, a bare merci is a refusal. Say oui, s'il vous plaît or volontiers if you want it.
• "Ça va ? is only a formula, like how are you in English." It is closer to a genuine question. A short honest answer, good or bad, is entirely normal.

What to carry forward

Greet first and greet a person: bonjour until the evening, bonsoir after it, salut only with friends, bonne nuit only at bedtime. Attach monsieur or madame and you sound like someone who has been in France before. Please is s'il vous plaît or s'il te plaît depending on who you are speaking to, and a bare merci when food is offered means no. Introduce yourself with je m'appelle, ask with comment vous appelez-vous or comment tu t'appelles, and answer ça va ? honestly. Above all, hold the tu and vous decision consciously: tu for one person you are close to, vous for one person you are not, and vous for every group without exception. Next lesson turns these fixed phrases into grammar, by taking the pronouns apart and conjugating the verb that half of French depends on.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). T-V distinction. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Tutoyer. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr
3. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Vouvoyer. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr
4. Larousse. Bonjour: définitions et expressions. Éditions Larousse. larousse.fr
5. Premier ministre de la République française. Circulaire du 21 février 2012 relative à la suppression des termes Mademoiselle, nom de jeune fille, nom patronymique, nom d'épouse et nom d'époux des formulaires et correspondances des administrations. Journal officiel.

In 1637 René Descartes published the Discours de la méthode in French rather than Latin, so that, as he put it, ordinary people could follow the argument. The sentence everyone remembers from it is four words long: Je pense, donc je suis. I think, therefore I am. Suis is the first person of être, to be, and it is the most useful verb form in the language. Everything you say about who you are, where you are and what you are like will run through it.

The nine subject pronouns

French	English	Notes
je	I	Becomes j' before a vowel or silent h: j'ai, j'habite. Not capitalised mid-sentence, unlike English I.
tu	you (one person, familiar)	One friend, one relative, one child, one animal.
il	he, it	Also every masculine noun: le livre becomes il.
elle	she, it	Also every feminine noun: la table becomes elle.
on	we, one, people, they	Takes the same verb form as il and elle. See below; this is the one to study.
nous	we	Formal writing and careful speech.
vous	you (polite singular, and every plural)	Both jobs, always.
ils	they (masculine, or a mixed group)	One man in a group of a thousand women makes the group ils.
elles	they (all feminine)	Only when every member is feminine.

Two points need drilling. First, il and elle are not only he and she. French nouns all have a gender, so a table is elle and a book is il, and English "it" has no separate word. Où est le livre ? Il est sur la table. (Where is the book? It is on the table.) Second, the masculine plural wins in mixed company: Marie, Sophie, Claire et Paul sont là ? Oui, ils sont là. This rule is old, contested by some writers today, and still what you will be tested on.

On, the pronoun that does the most work

Textbooks translate on as "one", which makes it sound like something a duchess says. In real French it is the ordinary spoken word for we. Listen to any conversation in France and you will hear on where a grammar book would put nous.

• On va au cinéma ? Shall we go to the cinema?
• On est en retard. We are late.
• En France, on dîne tard. In France, people eat late. (Here it is the impersonal "one" or "people".)
• On m'a dit que... I was told that... (literally, someone told me).

The mechanical fact to remember: however many people on refers to, it takes the third person singular verb, exactly like il and elle. So it is on est (we are), never on sont. Nous is not dead; it is simply more formal, and it still appears in writing, in speeches and in set phrases.

What matters here: in spoken French, on is the default "we". Learn one extra verb form, the third person singular, and you can say almost everything you would otherwise need nous for.

être in the present

French	English	Sounds roughly like
je suis	I am	zhuh SWEE
tu es	you are	tu AY
il / elle / on est	he / she / it / we is, are	ee-LAY, e-LAY, oh-NAY
nous sommes	we are	noo SOM
vous êtes	you are	voo-ZET
ils / elles sont	they are	eel SOHN, el SOHN

Three sound notes, all of them Module 1 doing its job. Tu es is two syllables and the s of es is silent. Il est links its l forward, so it is one smooth "ee-LAY", and on est wakes the n of on: "oh-NAY". Vous êtes has a compulsory liaison z, giving "voo-ZET", and this one is worth practising because it is the phrase you will use every time you address a stranger.

Watch out for the pair that beginners collide: ils sont (they are) and ils ont (they have, from avoir, next lesson). The first has an s sound; the second has a z from the liaison. "eel SOHN" against "eel ZOHN". One consonant separates being from having.

What être is for

1. Identity: Je suis Camille. I am Camille.
2. Description: Il est grand. He is tall. La ville est belle. The city is beautiful.
3. Nationality: Elle est française. She is French. Note the small f: French does not capitalise adjectives of nationality, though it does capitalise the noun, as in une Française.
4. Profession: Mon père est professeur. My father is a teacher.
5. Origin: Nous sommes de Lyon. We are from Lyon.
6. Location: Le livre est sur la table. The book is on the table.
7. Time: Il est huit heures. It is eight o'clock.

Number four hides a rule English speakers break constantly. After être, a profession takes no article. You say Je suis étudiant (I am a student), Elle est médecin (She is a doctor), Il est ingénieur (He is an engineer). Putting in un or une is wrong: not merely unidiomatic, but ungrammatical in standard French. The same goes for religions and, usually, for nationalities: Je suis américain.

The article comes back the moment you use c'est instead: C'est un professeur. (He is a teacher, or That is a teacher.) The short version of a rule you will meet in full later: il est plus a bare noun or an adjective; c'est plus an article and a noun.

The adjective has to agree

You cannot use être for long without meeting agreement, so here it is in miniature. An adjective after être matches its subject in gender and number, usually by adding e for feminine and s for plural.

Subject	Sentence	English
masculine singular	Il est content.	He is happy.
feminine singular	Elle est contente.	She is happy.
masculine plural	Ils sont contents.	They are happy.
feminine plural	Elles sont contentes.	They are happy.

Say those four aloud. The written difference is up to two letters; the spoken difference is one, because the feminine e sounds the t while the plural s stays silent. So content and contents are identical to the ear, and contente and contentes are identical to each other. Lesson 8 takes this apart properly.

Saying it is not so

Negation gets a full lesson later, but you need it now. French wraps the verb in two pieces: ne in front and pas behind.

• Je ne suis pas fatigué. I am not tired.
• Il n'est pas là. He is not there. (Elision: ne becomes n' before est.)
• Nous ne sommes pas d'accord. We do not agree.

In casual speech the ne is often dropped entirely, so you will hear C'est pas vrai (That's not true) rather than Ce n'est pas vrai. Recognise it; write the full form.

In short: être plus an adjective describes, être plus a bare noun states a job or a nationality, and ne plus pas around the verb makes any of it negative.

A short exchange, with everything in it

• Bonjour, je m'appelle Louis. Et vous ? (Hello, my name is Louis. And you?)
• Bonjour, monsieur. Je suis Aminata. Je suis étudiante. (Hello, sir. I am Aminata. I am a student.)
• Vous êtes d'ici ? (Are you from here?)
• Non, je ne suis pas d'ici. Je suis de Dakar. Et vous, vous êtes professeur ? (No, I am not from here. I am from Dakar. And you, are you a teacher?)
• Oui, on est trois professeurs dans ma famille. (Yes, there are three of us who are teachers in my family.)

Everything in that exchange is from this lesson and the last: vous with a stranger, the liaison in vous êtes, a profession with no article, a feminine agreement on étudiante, ne and pas around the verb, and on doing the work of nous.

Common misconceptions

• "Je suis quinze ans means I am fifteen." It does not. It means something like "I am fifteen years", which is nonsense in French. Age uses avoir: J'ai quinze ans. The next lesson is entirely about this.
• "Je suis un étudiant is the polite full version." It is an error. After être, professions, nationalities and religions drop the article: Je suis étudiant.
• "On is formal, like the English one." Backwards. On is the everyday spoken we, and nous is the more formal option.
• "Il and elle only mean he and she." They also mean "it", because every French noun is masculine or feminine and takes the matching pronoun.
• "Elles works for a mixed group if most of them are women." No. One masculine member makes the whole group ils, whatever the proportions.

The short version

French has nine subject pronouns, and the one that repays study is on: it means we in ordinary speech and takes the third person singular verb. Il and elle cover it as well as he and she, because nouns have gender, and ils takes over any group containing one masculine member. The verb être runs je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont, with a compulsory liaison in vous êtes and a link forward in il est and on est. Use it for identity, description, nationality, profession, origin, place and the time, and remember that professions and nationalities take no article after it. Adjectives agree with the subject. Ne and pas wrap the verb to make it negative. Next comes the other half of the pair, avoir, and with it the single most common mistake English speakers make in French.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French personal pronouns. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe être. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
3. Wiktionary contributors. être. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Romance copula. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Descartes, R. (1637). Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. Leiden: Jan Maire.

A fifteen year old in Lyon does not say that she is fifteen. She says J'ai quinze ans: I have fifteen years. French files age under possession rather than under description, and that single fact sits behind the most common error English speakers make in the language. Je suis quinze is not a small slip. It is roughly as strange as saying "I am fifteen" in English while meaning "I own fifteen".

avoir in the present

French	English	Sounds roughly like
j'ai	I have	zhay
tu as	you have	tu AH
il / elle / on a	he / she / we has, have	ee-LA, e-LA, oh-NA
nous avons	we have	noo-za-VOHN
vous avez	you have	voo-za-VAY
ils / elles ont	they have	eel-ZOHN, el-ZOHN

Four of those six forms begin with a vowel, which makes avoir a liaison factory. Nous avons, vous avez and ils ont all take a compulsory z; on a wakes the n; and je elides to j'. Notice too that j'ai is a single syllable. Beginners often stretch it into two, "zhuh-ay", and it is not.

Then the pair that will trip you up in listening for a year:

Written	Sound	Verb	English
ils sont	eel SOHN	être	they are
ils ont	eel ZOHN	avoir	they have
elles sont	el SOHN	être	they are
elles ont	el ZOHN	avoir	they have

Why this matters: one consonant, s against z, separates being from having, and French uses both constantly. When you cannot tell which you heard, listen for what follows: a noun without an article usually means être and a profession, while a number or an article usually means avoir.

Where French has and English is

A whole family of everyday states is expressed with avoir in French and with "to be" in English. These are not optional idioms you can paraphrase; they are the normal way to say these things.

French	Literally	English
J'ai quinze ans.	I have fifteen years.	I am fifteen.
J'ai faim.	I have hunger.	I am hungry.
J'ai soif.	I have thirst.	I am thirsty.
J'ai chaud.	I have hot.	I am hot.
J'ai froid.	I have cold.	I am cold.
J'ai sommeil.	I have sleep.	I am sleepy.
J'ai peur.	I have fear.	I am afraid.
J'ai raison.	I have reason.	I am right.
J'ai tort.	I have wrong.	I am wrong.
J'ai besoin d'un stylo.	I have need of a pen.	I need a pen.
J'ai envie de dormir.	I have desire of to sleep.	I feel like sleeping.
J'ai mal à la tête.	I have pain at the head.	I have a headache.
Il a l'air fatigué.	He has the air tired.	He looks tired.

Two housekeeping rules go with the age one. The word ans is compulsory: English can say "I am fifteen" and stop, French cannot say J'ai quinze. And to ask, you say Quel âge as-tu ? or Quel âge avez-vous ?, literally "What age do you have?"

Note also that these expressions take no article: j'ai faim, never j'ai une faim. And because faim, soif and the rest are nouns rather than adjectives, you intensify them with très: J'ai très faim. (I am very hungry.) A French speaker saying "I have very hunger" in English is making the same mistake in reverse.

il y a: there is, there are, and ago

Il y a is built from avoir and never changes for number. One thing or forty, it stays the same.

• Il y a un problème. There is a problem.
• Il y a vingt élèves dans la classe. There are twenty students in the class.
• Qu'est-ce qu'il y a ? What is the matter? (Literally, what is there?)
• Il n'y a pas de pain. There is no bread.

It has a second life as a time expression meaning ago: Il y a deux ans, j'habitais à Nice. Two years ago, I lived in Nice. In speech it usually collapses to something like "ya", so Il y a un problème comes out as "ya uhn pro-BLEM". Recognising that compression is a real listening skill.

The negative that changes the article

Here is a rule that surprises everyone and then never stops being useful. After a negative, the indefinite articles un, une and des all collapse into plain de (or d' before a vowel).

Positive	Negative	English
J'ai un frère.	Je n'ai pas de frère.	I have a brother. / I do not have a brother.
Elle a une voiture.	Elle n'a pas de voiture.	She has a car. / She has no car.
Nous avons des cousins.	Nous n'avons pas de cousins.	We have cousins. / We have no cousins.
Il y a un chien.	Il n'y a pas de chien.	There is a dog. / There is no dog.

One exception, and it is the exception you will meet first: this does not happen after être. C'est un livre becomes Ce n'est pas un livre, not pas de livre. The rule is about the thing you have or do not have, not about what something is.

La famille

Masculine	English	Feminine	English
le père	father	la mère	mother
le frère	brother	la sœur	sister
le fils	son	la fille	daughter, girl
le grand-père	grandfather	la grand-mère	grandmother
l'oncle	uncle	la tante	aunt
le cousin	cousin	la cousine	cousin
le neveu	nephew	la nièce	niece
le mari	husband	la femme	wife, woman
le beau-père	stepfather, father-in-law	la belle-mère	stepmother, mother-in-law
le demi-frère	half-brother, stepbrother	la demi-sœur	half-sister, stepsister

Three of these are doing double duty and are worth a note. La fille is both daughter and girl, so ma fille is my daughter and une fille is a girl. La femme is both wife and woman, in the same way. And le fils, remember, is the word from Lesson 1 whose final s is pronounced: "feess".

The plurals are usually regular: les parents (parents, and also relatives more broadly), les enfants (children), les grands-parents, les petits-enfants (grandchildren). Note that beau- and belle- cover both the step relationship and the in-law relationship, so ma belle-mère is either your stepmother or your mother-in-law and only context decides.

To say whose, use de: la sœur de Marc (Marc's sister), le fils de la voisine (the neighbour's son). French has no apostrophe-s construction at all, so English "Marc's sister" has to be turned around into "the sister of Marc". Lesson 9 does this properly.

Putting avoir to work

• Tu as des frères et sœurs ? (Do you have brothers and sisters?)
• Oui, j'ai une sœur et deux frères. Ma sœur a dix-huit ans. (Yes, I have one sister and two brothers. My sister is eighteen.)
• Et tes grands-parents, ils ont quel âge ? (And your grandparents, how old are they?)
• Ma grand-mère a soixante-dix ans. Je n'ai pas de grand-père. (My grandmother is seventy. I do not have a grandfather.)
• Tu as faim ? Il y a du pain. (Are you hungry? There is some bread.)
• Non merci, mais j'ai très soif. (No thank you, but I am very thirsty.)

Read that back and count the machinery: five uses of avoir, two ages, one avoir expression, one il y a, one negative that turned un into de, and a non merci that means exactly what Lesson 4 warned you it means.

Bottom line: whenever you are about to say "I am" plus a temporary bodily state or a number of years, stop and check whether French wants avoir instead. Nine times out of ten it does.

Common misconceptions

• "J'ai quinze is enough for I am fifteen." The word ans is not optional in French. Say J'ai quinze ans.
• "J'ai très faim is wrong because très cannot modify a noun." In these fixed expressions it is exactly right. J'ai très faim, j'ai très soif, j'ai très peur are all standard.
• "Il y a changes to ils y ont for plurals." It never changes. Il y a un chat, il y a quarante chats.
• "Pas de replaces every article after a negative." Only un, une, des and the partitive. The definite articles le, la and les survive: Je n'aime pas le café. And nothing changes after être: Ce n'est pas un problème.
• "Ma belle-mère must mean mother-in-law." It equally means stepmother. French uses beau- and belle- for both relationships.

What you now know

Avoir runs j'ai, tu as, il a, nous avons, vous avez, ils ont, with liaisons in four of the six forms and a z that separates ils ont from ils sont. French uses it where English uses "to be" for age, hunger, thirst, heat, cold, sleepiness, fear, being right or wrong, needing, feeling like, and hurting, and those expressions take no article but do take très. Il y a means there is and there are without ever changing, and also means ago. After a negative, un, une and des become de, unless the verb is être. And you now have enough family vocabulary to describe a household, with de doing the work of the English apostrophe. Module 3 steps back to the noun itself and asks the question every French sentence answers before it starts: masculine or feminine?

Sources

1. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe avoir. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
2. Le Robert. Avoir: définition, expressions et locutions. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com
3. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Avoir. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French verbs. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. TV5MONDE. Apprendre le français: A1 vocabulary and grammar exercises. TV5MONDE. apprendre.tv5monde.com

In French the sea is feminine, la mer, and the ocean is masculine, l'océan. Same water. A bicycle is le vélo if you use one word for it and la bicyclette if you use the other. And une personne (a person) is feminine even when the person is a man: Cette personne est arrivée works perfectly well about your father. Gender in French attaches to the word, not to the thing the word names. Accept that and the system stops feeling absurd and starts being learnable.

Why gender is not optional information

You cannot store a French noun without its gender, because gender leaks into everything around the noun. The article changes, adjectives change, past participles sometimes change, and pronouns change. Learning table on its own is close to useless; learning une table is useful. Write your vocabulary with the article attached, always. Every experienced learner of French will tell you the same thing, and most of them learned it the hard way after two years of guessing.

Key idea: the unit of French vocabulary is not the noun. It is the article plus the noun.

Endings that predict gender

Gender is not random, it is just not meaningful. Word endings predict it with real accuracy, and a handful of them carry most of the vocabulary you will meet this year.

Usually masculine	Examples	Usually feminine	Examples
-age	le fromage (cheese), le voyage (trip)	-tion, -sion	la nation, la décision, la question
-ment	le gouvernement, le moment	-té	la liberté (freedom), la beauté (beauty)
-eau	le bureau (office, desk), le gâteau (cake)	-ette	la baguette, la cigarette
-isme	le tourisme, le réalisme	-ance, -ence	la chance (luck), la science
-oir	le miroir (mirror), le devoir (homework, duty)	-ie	la vie (life), la géographie
-ier	le cahier (notebook), le quartier (neighbourhood)	-ure	la voiture (car), la nature

The two most reliable are -tion and -té on the feminine side: essentially every noun with those endings is feminine, and there are thousands of them, most of which look like their English cousins. That single fact hands you a large vocabulary with the gender already attached.

The -age group has a famous set of exceptions worth memorising as a list, because they are common words: la page (page), la plage (beach), l'image (picture, feminine), la cage, la nage (swimming), la rage. And on the -eau side, l'eau (water) and la peau (skin) are feminine.

Making things plural

The default is boring and that is good news: add an s, which is silent. Le livre becomes les livres, and the two sound identical. Only the article tells a listener how many there are, which is one more reason to take articles seriously.

Pattern	Singular	Plural	English
default: add s	le livre	les livres	the book, the books
already ends in s, x or z: no change	le fils, le prix, le nez	les fils, les prix, les nez	the sons, the prices, the noses
-eau and -eu: add x	le bateau, le jeu	les bateaux, les jeux	the boats, the games
-al becomes -aux	le journal, l'animal	les journaux, les animaux	the newspapers, the animals
a few -ail become -aux	le travail	les travaux	the works, the roadworks
irregular	l'œil	les yeux	the eye, the eyes

The -al rule has friendly exceptions: le bal becomes les bals and le festival becomes les festivals. And note madame and monsieur, which pluralise both halves: mesdames, messieurs. When you thank a room you say Merci, messieurs-dames.

The four kinds of article

English has three little words in this territory: the, a, some. French has four sets, and they are not optional. A French noun almost always has a determiner in front of it, where English is happy to say a bare "I like coffee" or "we bought bread".

Type	Masc. sing.	Fem. sing.	Before a vowel	Plural	Rough English
definite	le	la	l'	les	the
indefinite	un	une	un, une	des	a, an, some
partitive	du	de la	de l'	des	some, any
after a negative	de	de	d'	de	no, not any

Look at the plural column. Des is both the indefinite plural and the partitive plural, and English usually translates it as nothing at all: J'ai des amis à Paris is "I have friends in Paris". Leaving it out is one of the tells of an anglophone writing French. There is no such thing in French as a bare plural noun after a verb like that.

Two contractions you cannot avoid

When à (to, at) or de (of, from) collides with le or les, they fuse. This is compulsory, and forgetting it is the most visible beginner error in written French.

Not written	Written	Example	English
à le	au	Je vais au cinéma.	I am going to the cinema.
à les	aux	Il parle aux enfants.	He is talking to the children.
à la	à la (no change)	Elle va à la piscine.	She is going to the pool.
à l'	à l' (no change)	On va à l'école.	We are going to school.
de le	du	C'est le livre du professeur.	It is the teacher's book.
de les	des	la porte des voisins	the neighbours' door

Notice what that last pair implies: du and des each do two completely different jobs. Du pain is partitive, some bread. Le livre du professeur is the contraction of de le, the teacher's book. Same word, different grammar, and only the sentence tells you which.

Where French uses the and English does not

The definite article turns up in French in places an English speaker would leave empty. These are not stylistic flourishes; the sentence is wrong without them.

• General statements: J'aime le café. I like coffee. Les chats sont indépendants. Cats are independent.
• Countries and regions: la France, le Canada, les États-Unis, le Sénégal.
• Days of the week, meaning every one: Le lundi, j'ai cours de maths. On Mondays I have a maths class. Without the article, Lundi, j'ai cours means this coming Monday only.
• Body parts: J'ai mal à la tête. I have a headache, not "at my head".
• Languages and school subjects: J'étudie le français et l'histoire. I study French and history.

The core of it: French dislikes a naked noun. If you are about to write a noun with nothing in front of it, check whether you have dropped an article.

A worked pair, and then the same pair broken

Take Je mange du pain (I am eating some bread). The noun is masculine, the amount is unspecified, so the partitive du is right. Now make it negative and one thing changes: Je ne mange pas de pain. (I do not eat bread.) The partitive collapses to de, exactly as un and une did in the last lesson.

Now change one input again. Make it a general statement rather than a quantity: Je n'aime pas le pain. (I do not like bread.) The article stays le, because this is not about a quantity you are or are not consuming; it is a statement about bread in general, and general statements take the definite article, negative or not. Three sentences, three different words in the same slot, and the difference is what the sentence is actually claiming.

Common misconceptions

• "Gender is about whether the thing is masculine or feminine." It is about the word. La mer and l'océan are the same substance. Une personne stays feminine for a man. Le professeur was masculine for centuries whoever held the job, though la professeure is now standard in Quebec and increasingly used in France.
• "You can leave out des the way English leaves out some." You cannot. J'ai amis is not a sentence. It has to be J'ai des amis.
• "The plural s is pronounced, so I can hear plurals." It is silent. What you actually hear is the article, or a liaison. Les livres and le livre differ only in the vowel of the article.
• "Du always means some." It also means "of the", from the contraction of de plus le. Context decides.
• "If I get a gender wrong nobody will notice." They will notice, and they will still understand you. Gender errors are the most forgiven mistake in French and also the one that most marks you as a learner, which is why the article-with-the-noun habit pays off so heavily.

Where this leaves us

Every French noun carries a gender that belongs to the word rather than to the thing, so you learn nouns with their article attached. Endings predict gender well: -tion, -sion, -té, -ette, -ance, -ence, -ie and -ure are almost always feminine, while -age, -ment, -eau, -isme, -oir and -ier are usually masculine. Plurals normally add a silent s, but words already ending in s, x or z do not change, -eau and -eu take an x, and -al becomes -aux. Four sets of articles cover the ground: le, la, l', les; un, une, des; du, de la, de l', des; and plain de after a negative. À and de contract with le and les to give au, aux, du and des, which is compulsory. And French puts a definite article in front of general statements, countries, languages, body parts and repeated days of the week, where English uses nothing. Next lesson the adjectives arrive, and they have to agree with everything you have just learned to label.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French articles and determiners. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Genre grammatical. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Grammatical gender. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Larousse. Dictionnaire de français: gender and plural forms. Éditions Larousse. larousse.fr
5. Académie française. Dire, ne pas dire: questions on the feminisation of job titles. Académie française. academie-francaise.fr

Un homme grand is a tall man. Un grand homme is a great man. Two words, identical spelling, and the only difference is which side of the noun the adjective stands on. French adjective position is not decoration or emphasis. Some of the time it is meaning.

The default: agree, and follow

A French adjective does two things an English adjective never does. It changes its ending to match the noun in gender and number, and it usually stands after the noun rather than before it.

Form	Rule	Example	English
masculine singular	dictionary form	un livre intéressant	an interesting book
feminine singular	add e	une histoire intéressante	an interesting story
masculine plural	add s	des livres intéressants	interesting books
feminine plural	add es	des histoires intéressantes	interesting stories

Two shortcuts. An adjective that already ends in an unaccented e does not change for the feminine at all: rouge (red), jaune (yellow), calme, sympathique (nice), facile (easy), difficile. And an adjective ending in s or x does not change for the masculine plural: un homme heureux, des hommes heureux (a happy man, happy men).

Remember Lesson 1 while you do this. The written difference between intéressant and intéressante is one letter; the spoken difference is a whole audible t. The written difference between intéressante and intéressantes is one letter and there is no spoken difference at all.

The feminine patterns worth knowing by heart

Masculine ending	Feminine	Example	English
-eux	-euse	heureux, heureuse	happy
-f	-ve	actif, active; neuf, neuve	active; brand new
-er	-ère	cher, chère; premier, première	dear or expensive; first
-en	-enne	italien, italienne	Italian
-on	-onne	bon, bonne	good
-el	-elle	naturel, naturelle	natural
-et	-ette or -ète	muet, muette; complet, complète	silent; complete

Every doubled consonant in that table is doing the same job as the final e: it makes the consonant audible and blocks the nasal vowel. Bon is a nasal; bonne is not. Italien is a nasal; italienne is not. You met this in Lesson 2 and here is where it pays.

Then the genuinely irregular ones, which are unfortunately among the most common adjectives in the language: beau / belle (beautiful), nouveau / nouvelle (new), vieux / vieille (old), blanc / blanche (white), long / longue (long), doux / douce (soft, sweet, mild), faux / fausse (false), gentil / gentille (kind), frais / fraîche (fresh), sec / sèche (dry).

The three adjectives with a secret second masculine

Beau, nouveau and vieux each have an extra masculine singular form used only in front of a word beginning with a vowel or a silent h. The reason is pure sound: French dislikes two vowels colliding.

Before a consonant	Before a vowel	Feminine	English
un beau garçon	un bel homme	une belle femme	a good-looking boy, man, woman
un nouveau livre	un nouvel ami	une nouvelle amie	a new book, a new friend
un vieux quartier	un vieil immeuble	une vieille maison	an old neighbourhood, building, house

Remember: bel, nouvel and vieil are masculine, not feminine, however much they look like the feminine forms. Un bel homme is a handsome man.

Plurals of adjectives

• Default: add s. petit, petits.
• Already ends in s or x: no change. gris, gris (grey); heureux, heureux.
• Ends in -eau: add x. beau, beaux; nouveau, nouveaux.
• Ends in -al: becomes -aux. normal, normaux; national, nationaux. Exceptions include banal, banals and fatal, fatals.
• Feminine plurals are always simply the feminine plus s: heureuses, belles, nouvelles, normales.

Where the adjective goes

Most French adjectives follow the noun. That includes every colour, every nationality, every shape, every long adjective and every past participle used as an adjective: une voiture rouge (a red car), un film français (a French film), une table ronde (a round table), un exercice difficile, une porte fermée (a closed door).

A short list goes in front, and the usual mnemonic for it is BAGS: Beauty, Age, Goodness, Size.

Category	Adjectives	Example	English
Beauty	beau, joli	une jolie robe	a pretty dress
Age	jeune, vieux, nouveau	un jeune homme	a young man
Goodness	bon, mauvais, gentil	une bonne idée	a good idea
Size	grand, petit, gros, long, haut	un petit problème	a small problem

A few others join them: premier and dernier (first, last), même (same), autre (other), tout (all). Everything else, and it is the vast majority, comes afterwards.

One tidy detail for writing: when a plural adjective comes before its noun, careful written French turns des into de. So des livres but de beaux livres (beautiful books), des amis but de vieux amis (old friends). In speech many people keep des, and both are heard; the version with de is what an exam expects.

When the position changes the meaning

This is the part worth real attention. A small group of adjectives has a literal meaning after the noun and a figurative or subjective meaning before it. The pattern is not random: in front of the noun the adjective tends to express the speaker's judgement, and after the noun it tends to state a fact about the thing.

Adjective	Before the noun	After the noun
grand	un grand homme, a great man	un homme grand, a tall man
ancien	mon ancien professeur, my former teacher	un bâtiment ancien, an old building
cher	mon cher ami, my dear friend	un livre cher, an expensive book
propre	ma propre chambre, my own room	une chambre propre, a clean room
pauvre	le pauvre garçon, the poor boy, meaning unfortunate	un garçon pauvre, a boy with no money
dernier	la dernière semaine, the final week	la semaine dernière, last week
seul	la seule femme, the only woman	une femme seule, a woman on her own

Read the pauvre row twice. Le pauvre garçon a perdu son chien is "The poor boy has lost his dog", and says nothing about money. Un garçon pauvre says exactly the thing the first sentence does not.

The upshot: for most adjectives, position is fixed and you learn it. For this handful, position is a choice and the choice is the meaning.

Colours, and the ones that never change

Colours behave like ordinary adjectives, follow the noun and agree: une voiture bleue, des chaussures noires (black shoes), une chemise blanche (a white shirt). But colours borrowed from the name of an object are invariable, because they are really nouns in disguise: marron (chestnut, so brown), orange, turquoise. You write des chaussures marron and des rideaux orange, with no s. Compound colours are invariable too: une veste bleu clair (a light blue jacket), des yeux bleu-vert.

Common misconceptions

• "Adjectives go after the noun in French, full stop." Most do. But the BAGS group, plus premier, dernier, même, autre and tout, go in front, and they are among the most frequent adjectives in the language.
• "Bel and vieil are feminine forms." They are masculine, used only before a vowel or silent h. The feminines are belle and vieille.
• "If it sounds the same it does not matter." Written agreement is graded, and many agreements are audible anyway: petit and petite, bon and bonne, heureux and heureuse.
• "Un grand homme and un homme grand are the same thing with different emphasis." They mean different things: great, and tall.
• "All colours agree." Not the ones named after objects. Marron and orange never change.

Putting it together

A French adjective agrees with its noun in gender and number: add e for the feminine, s for the plural, es for both, and nothing at all if the word already ends in e, or in s or x for the masculine plural. Learn the recurring feminine patterns (-eux to -euse, -f to -ve, -er to -ère, -en to -enne, -on to -onne) and the irregulars beau, nouveau, vieux, blanc, long, doux, gentil and frais. Beau, nouveau and vieux each keep a special masculine form, bel, nouvel and vieil, for use before a vowel. Most adjectives follow the noun; the BAGS set of beauty, age, goodness and size goes in front, and so do premier, dernier, même, autre and tout. For grand, ancien, cher, propre, pauvre, dernier and seul, the position decides the meaning. Colours agree except when they are named after an object. Next lesson we say whose the thing is, which needs adjectives that agree with something surprising.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French grammar: adjectives. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Le Robert. Dictionnaire de français: adjective entries and feminine forms. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com
3. Larousse. Dictionnaire de français: accord de l'adjectif qualificatif. Éditions Larousse. larousse.fr
4. BBC Bitesize. French: adjectives and agreement. BBC. bbc.co.uk

English can turn any noun into an owner by hanging two characters on the end of it: Marie's brother, the teacher's book, yesterday's newspaper. French cannot. That construction does not exist in the language at all. Every one of those phrases has to be turned around and rebuilt with de: le frère de Marie, the brother of Marie. Once you stop looking for the apostrophe and start reversing the order, possession in French becomes one of the easier corners of the grammar.

de, and the contractions that come with it

The pattern is always the same: the thing owned first, then de, then the owner.

French	Literally	English
le frère de Marie	the brother of Marie	Marie's brother
la voiture de mon père	the car of my father	my father's car
le livre du professeur	the book of the teacher	the teacher's book
les clés des voisins	the keys of the neighbours	the neighbours' keys
la porte de l'école	the door of the school	the school door

Rows three and four are last lesson's contractions doing their job. De plus le is written du; de plus les is written des; de la and de l' stay as they are. Writing de le professeur is not a slightly clumsy version of du professeur. It is simply not French.

The same structure covers a lot of ground English handles with a bare noun stacked in front of another: un cours de français (a French class), une salle de classe (a classroom), un professeur de maths (a maths teacher), un sac à dos (a rucksack, literally a bag for the back). French almost never stacks two nouns; it joins them with a preposition.

The possessive adjectives, and the trap inside them

Owner	+ masc. sing.	+ fem. sing.	+ plural	English
je	mon	ma	mes	my
tu	ton	ta	tes	your (one friend)
il, elle, on	son	sa	ses	his, her, its
nous	notre	notre	nos	our
vous	votre	votre	vos	your (polite or plural)
ils, elles	leur	leur	leurs	their

Now the single most important sentence in this lesson. The possessive adjective agrees with the thing owned, not with the person who owns it. English does the opposite: "his sister" and "her sister" differ because the owners differ. French does not care who the owner is; it looks at the noun that follows.

French	Possible English	Why
son frère	his brother OR her brother	frère is masculine, so son, whoever owns him
sa sœur	his sister OR her sister	sœur is feminine, so sa, whoever owns her
ses parents	his parents OR her parents	parents is plural, so ses

So Paul et sa sœur is Paul and his sister, while Marie et son frère is Marie and her brother. If you translate word for word from English you will produce Marie et sa frère, which is wrong twice over.

The point: before you choose between son and sa, look forward at the noun, never backwards at the owner.

When French genuinely needs to disambiguate, it adds a stressed pronoun: son livre à lui (his book) against son livre à elle (her book). This is not everyday usage; context normally settles it, and French speakers are not troubled by the ambiguity any more than English speakers are troubled by "their".

Why it is mon amie and not ma amie

There is one exception, and it exists for sound rather than grammar. Before a feminine singular noun beginning with a vowel or a silent h, you use mon, ton and son instead of ma, ta and sa, because French refuses to let ma and amie collide.

• mon amie (my friend, female), not ma amie
• ton école (your school), not ta école
• son histoire (his or her story), not sa histoire
• mon habitude (my habit), not ma habitude

The noun stays feminine, so any adjective still agrees as feminine: mon ancienne amie (my former friend, female). Only the possessive changed shape, and only to avoid two vowels in a row. Compare the h aspiré case from Lesson 3: ma haine (my hatred) keeps ma, because that h behaves like a consonant.

The stressed pronouns

French has a second set of personal pronouns, used when a pronoun has to stand on its own, follow a preposition, or carry emphasis. They are called stressed or disjunctive pronouns.

Subject	Stressed	Example	English
je	moi	chez moi	at my place
tu	toi	avec toi	with you
il	lui	pour lui	for him
elle	elle	sans elle	without her
nous	nous	entre nous	between us
vous	vous	après vous	after you
ils	eux	devant eux	in front of them
elles	elles	derrière elles	behind them

Three jobs they do that the subject pronouns cannot:

1. Ownership with être plus à: À qui est ce stylo ? Il est à moi. Whose pen is this? It is mine. This is the ordinary way to claim something, and it uses no possessive adjective at all.
2. Emphasis, by doubling the subject: Moi, je préfère le thé. Me, I prefer tea. French cannot stress a word by saying it louder the way English can, because the stress falls at the end of the phrase, so it adds a pronoun instead.
3. Standing alone: Qui veut du gâteau ? Moi ! Who wants cake? Me!

Worth holding on to: after any preposition, the pronoun is the stressed one. Never avec je, always avec moi.

Asking whose

• À qui est ce livre ? Whose book is this? Answer: Il est à Marie. It is Marie's.
• C'est le livre de qui ? Whose book is it? A more casual phrasing.
• C'est ton sac ? Is this your bag? Answer: Non, ce n'est pas le mien. No, it is not mine.

That last answer uses a possessive pronoun, le mien, which is a step beyond this course. For French I, Il est à moi covers everything you need, and it is what most people say anyway.

A thing French does not do with possessives

Where English says "I wash my hands" or "she broke her arm", French uses the definite article and lets a reflexive pronoun show whose body it is: Je me lave les mains, literally I wash myself the hands. Elle s'est cassé le bras, she broke herself the arm. Saying je lave mes mains is not a disaster, but it sounds odd, in the way "I washed the hands of myself" sounds odd in English. Lesson 16 builds these reflexive verbs properly; for now, just notice that possessives step aside when the body is involved.

Common misconceptions

• "Son means his and sa means her." The most persistent error in first-year French. Both mean his or her; the choice depends entirely on the gender of the noun that follows.
• "Mon amie means my male friend." No. Mon appears there only to avoid a vowel clash. The noun is feminine and any adjective agrees as feminine.
• "Leur is plural so it must be leurs." Leur agrees with the thing owned, like all the others: leur maison (their house, one house), leurs maisons (their houses).
• "French must have an apostrophe possessive somewhere." It has none. Any English possessive has to be rebuilt with de, and any pair of stacked nouns usually does too.
• "Avec je is fine in casual speech." It is never said. Prepositions take the stressed pronouns: avec moi, pour toi, chez eux.

The takeaway

French builds possession backwards from English: the thing owned, then de, then the owner, with de plus le contracting to du and de plus les to des. The possessive adjectives are mon, ma, mes; ton, ta, tes; son, sa, ses; notre, nos; votre, vos; leur, leurs, and every one of them agrees with the thing owned rather than with the owner, which is why son frère is both his brother and her brother. Before a feminine noun starting with a vowel, ma, ta and sa become mon, ton and son for sound only. The stressed pronouns moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux, elles follow every preposition, carry emphasis when doubled with the subject, and claim ownership in the pattern il est à moi. And French leaves the possessive out entirely when talking about parts of the body. Module 4 leaves nouns behind and starts conjugating: three families of regular verbs, and the sentence patterns that go with them.

Sources

1. Wikipédia. (2024). Adjectif possessif. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French personal pronouns. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French grammar: determiners and possession. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Le Robert. Dictionnaire de français: entries for mon, son and leur. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com

When French needed a verb for searching online it did not build an irregular one. It made googliser. For sending a message it made mailer, and then tweeter, and then liker. Every one of them conjugates exactly like parler (to speak), a verb that has been in the language for a thousand years. The -er group is the open one: it is much the largest family of verbs in French, and it is the only family that new verbs join. Learn one set of six endings and you have unlocked most of the verbs you will ever meet.

Stem plus ending

Take the infinitive, chop off the -er, and you have the stem. Parler gives the stem parl-. Then add the endings.

Pronoun	Ending	parler (to speak)	English	Sounds like
je	-e	je parle	I speak	zhuh PARL
tu	-es	tu parles	you speak	tu PARL
il, elle, on	-e	il parle	he speaks	eel PARL
nous	-ons	nous parlons	we speak	noo par-LOHN
vous	-ez	vous parlez	you speak	voo par-LAY
ils, elles	-ent	ils parlent	they speak	eel PARL

Look hard at that last column, because it is the best news in French grammar. Je parle, tu parles, il parle and ils parlent are all pronounced identically. Four written forms, one sound. The endings -e, -es and -ent are all silent, and the s of tu is silent too. Only nous parlons and vous parlez sound different.

Why this matters: in speech, a regular -er verb has three forms, not six. That is a real reduction in what you have to produce under pressure. In writing, all six spellings matter and are marked, so you still have to know them cold.

One present tense, three English ones

French has a single present tense where English has three. Je parle français can be:

• I speak French.
• I am speaking French.
• I do speak French.

There is no French equivalent of the -ing form used this way. Je suis parlant is not a sentence. If you need to stress that something is happening right now, French adds a phrase: Je suis en train de parler (I am in the middle of speaking). And French has no auxiliary "do" at all, which will matter enormously in the negation and question lesson.

The -er verbs to know now

Verb	English	Verb	English
parler	to speak	regarder	to watch, to look at
aimer	to like, to love	écouter	to listen to
habiter	to live (somewhere)	chercher	to look for
étudier	to study	trouver	to find
travailler	to work	penser	to think
jouer	to play	donner	to give
chanter	to sing	demander	to ask
arriver	to arrive	rentrer	to go home, to get back
adorer	to love, to adore	détester	to hate

Three of those quietly absorb an English preposition. Regarder means to look at, écouter means to listen to, and chercher means to look for. The preposition is inside the French verb, so you do not add another one: Je regarde la télé (I am watching TV), J'écoute la radio (I am listening to the radio), Je cherche mes clés (I am looking for my keys). Adding à or pour there is a classic anglophone error.

Two of them take a preposition where English does not: jouer à for games and sports (je joue au football), jouer de for instruments (je joue du piano). And habiter works with or without a preposition: j'habite à Paris or j'habite Paris, both correct.

The small spelling changes

A handful of -er verbs change their spelling in some forms. None of these is irregular in any deep sense; each one is protecting a sound.

Verb	What changes	Why	Example
manger (to eat)	nous mangeons	The e keeps the g soft before o	Nous mangeons à midi. We eat at midday.
voyager (to travel)	nous voyageons	Same reason	Nous voyageons en train.
commencer (to begin)	nous commençons	The cédille keeps the c soft before o	Nous commençons à huit heures.
préférer (to prefer)	je préfère, ils préfèrent; but nous préférons	The stem vowel opens when it is stressed	Je préfère le thé. I prefer tea.
acheter (to buy)	j'achète; but nous achetons	Same	J'achète du pain. I am buying bread.
appeler (to call)	j'appelle; but nous appelons	A doubled l instead of an accent	Elle s'appelle Léa. Her name is Léa.
jeter (to throw)	je jette; but nous jetons	A doubled t	Je jette la balle.
payer (to pay)	je paie or je paye	Either spelling is accepted	Je paie l'addition. I am paying the bill.

The pattern across préférer, acheter, appeler and jeter is worth naming: the change happens in the four forms whose ending is silent, and disappears in nous and vous, whose endings are pronounced. When the ending goes silent, the stem carries the stress and the vowel has to open. That is why je préfère has a grave accent and nous préférons does not.

One warning: aller (to go) ends in -er and is not a member of this family at all. It is one of the most irregular verbs in French, and Lesson 14 handles it.

The school day, in French terms

French secondary school comes in two stages. The collège takes students roughly from eleven to fifteen, through the years called sixième, cinquième, quatrième, troisième, counting downwards, and ends with a national exam called the brevet. The lycée takes the next three years, seconde, première and terminale, and ends with the baccalauréat, universally called le bac. Work is marked out of twenty, and ten out of twenty is the pass mark, so a French student announcing a fourteen is reporting a good result, not a poor one.

French	English	French	English
le lycée	upper secondary school	la matière	school subject
le collège	lower secondary school	les devoirs	homework
le cours	the class, the lesson	la note	the mark, the grade
l'emploi du temps	the timetable	le contrôle	the test
la salle de classe	the classroom	la cantine	the canteen
l'élève	the pupil	la récréation	break, recess
le cahier	the exercise book	la trousse	the pencil case

The subjects: les maths, le français, l'histoire-géo (history and geography, taught as one subject), la physique-chimie, les SVT (sciences de la vie et de la Terre, biology and geology), l'EPS (éducation physique et sportive, PE), les langues vivantes (modern languages), and, in the final year, la philosophie, which is compulsory for every student in the general stream.

Now a paragraph of ordinary French built entirely from this lesson: J'habite à Toulouse et j'étudie au lycée. J'aime les maths et je déteste la physique. Le lundi, les cours commencent à huit heures. À midi, nous mangeons à la cantine. Le soir, je travaille, j'écoute de la musique et je regarde une série. Mes parents préfèrent que je travaille d'abord. (I live in Toulouse and I study at the lycée. I like maths and I hate physics. On Mondays classes start at eight. At midday we eat in the canteen. In the evening I work, I listen to music and I watch a series. My parents prefer me to work first.)

Liking things, and liking to do things

Verbs of liking take a definite article in front of the noun, because they are general statements: J'aime le sport (I like sport), Je déteste les maths (I hate maths), Elle adore le chocolat. Put an indefinite article there and you change the meaning: j'aime un film means you like one particular film.

To like doing something, put the second verb straight into the infinitive with nothing between: J'aime lire (I like reading), Je déteste attendre (I hate waiting), Nous préférons rester ici (We prefer to stay here). English needs "to" or "-ing"; French needs nothing at all.

In short: aimer plus a noun takes le, la or les; aimer plus a verb takes a bare infinitive.

Common misconceptions

• "Je parle and je suis parlant both work." Only the first is French. There is no progressive present built with être plus a participle.
• "Ils parlent must sound different from il parle." It does not. The -ent ending is silent, and the difference is visible only in writing or through a liaison, as in ils arrivent.
• "Aller is a regular -er verb because it ends in -er." It is one of the most irregular verbs in the language: je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont.
• "Je regarde à la télé is more polite." It is wrong. Regarder already contains the "at", as écouter contains the "to" and chercher contains the "for".
• "Nous mangons is a spelling mistake nobody notices." It changes the sound: without the e the g would be hard. The correct form is nous mangeons.

What to remember

Regular -er verbs take the endings -e, -es, -e, -ons, -ez, -ent on the stem left after removing -er, and four of those six forms are pronounced identically, so the spoken verb has three shapes and the written verb has six. The French present covers all three English presents, and there is no auxiliary "do" and no progressive. Regarder, écouter and chercher swallow their English prepositions; jouer takes à for games and de for instruments. A short list of verbs changes spelling to protect a sound: nous mangeons, nous commençons, je préfère, j'achète, j'appelle, je jette. Aller looks like a member of the family and is not. With this one family plus être and avoir you can already describe a school day, and the next lesson adds the two smaller regular families that complete the set.

Sources

1. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe parler. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French conjugation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French verbs. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Ministère de l'Éducation nationale. L'organisation du collège et du lycée en France. education.gouv.fr. education.gouv.fr
5. TV5MONDE. Apprendre le français: A1 grammar and vocabulary. TV5MONDE. apprendre.tv5monde.com

Two French verbs, both ending in -ir. Finir is to finish; partir is to leave. Put each into the nous form and something odd happens: one of them grows a syllable and the other does not. Nous finissons. Nous partons. That extra -iss- is the dividing line of the whole -ir group, and only the half that has it is regular. Sorting the two apart is the main job of this lesson.

The regular -ir family: finir

Take the infinitive, remove -ir, and you have the stem: finir gives fin-. The endings are -is, -is, -it, -issons, -issez, -issent.

Pronoun	finir (to finish)	English	Sounds like
je	je finis	I finish	zhuh fee-NEE
tu	tu finis	you finish	tu fee-NEE
il, elle, on	il finit	he finishes	eel fee-NEE
nous	nous finissons	we finish	noo fee-nee-SOHN
vous	vous finissez	you finish	voo fee-nee-SAY
ils, elles	ils finissent	they finish	eel fee-NEECE

The three singular forms sound the same, exactly as they did for -er verbs, because the final s and t are silent. The three plural forms all carry the audible -iss-. So the spoken verb again has fewer shapes than the written one, though not as few: ils finissent is clearly different from il finit, which is not true of ils parlent and il parle.

The core of it: if the plural forms have -iss-, the verb is regular. If they do not, it is in the other group and has to be learned separately.

The verbs in this family, and the pattern hiding in them

Verb	English	Verb	English
finir	to finish	réfléchir	to think, to reflect
choisir	to choose	remplir	to fill
réussir	to succeed, to pass an exam	obéir (à)	to obey
grandir	to grow up, to get taller	punir	to punish
rougir	to blush, to turn red	ralentir	to slow down
maigrir	to get thinner	atterrir	to land
grossir	to put on weight	guérir	to heal, to get better

Read the second column again and a pattern appears. Grand means big, and grandir means to become big. Rouge is red and rougir is to turn red. Gros is fat and grossir is to become fat; maigre is thin and maigrir is to become thin. Lent is slow and ralentir is to slow down. This family is full of verbs built from adjectives with the meaning "to become". It is a productive pattern, which is why so many of the group are about change of state.

Two of them take a preposition: obéir à (to obey someone) and réfléchir à (to think about something). Réussir à plus an infinitive means to manage to do something, while réussir un examen means to pass an exam.

The other -ir verbs: the partir group

These end in -ir and are not regular. There is no -iss-; instead the singular forms drop the last consonant of the stem and the plural forms bring it back.

Pronoun	partir (to leave)	dormir (to sleep)	sortir (to go out)
je	je pars	je dors	je sors
tu	tu pars	tu dors	tu sors
il, elle, on	il part	il dort	il sort
nous	nous partons	nous dormons	nous sortons
vous	vous partez	vous dormez	vous sortez
ils, elles	ils partent	ils dorment	ils sortent

Servir (to serve), sentir (to feel, to smell) and mentir (to lie) all follow the same shape. The rule of thumb: knock the final consonant off the singular stem, put it back for the plural. Part- becomes par- in the singular; dorm- becomes dor-.

Then there is venir (to come), which is irregular in its own way and far too useful to skip: je viens, tu viens, il vient, nous venons, vous venez, ils viennent. Tenir (to hold) follows it exactly. Venir also gives you a neat construction: venir de plus an infinitive means to have just done something. Je viens de finir mes devoirs. I have just finished my homework.

Regular -re verbs: vendre

The smallest of the three families and the easiest, because the endings are almost nothing at all. Remove -re to get the stem, then add -s, -s, nothing, -ons, -ez, -ent.

Pronoun	vendre (to sell)	English	Sounds like
je	je vends	I sell	zhuh VAHN
tu	tu vends	you sell	tu VAHN
il, elle, on	il vend	he sells	eel VAHN
nous	nous vendons	we sell	noo vahn-DOHN
vous	vous vendez	you sell	voo vahn-DAY
ils, elles	ils vendent	they sell	eel VAHND

The third person singular has no ending at all: just the stem. Il vend, elle attend, on répond. Beginners keep adding a t there by analogy with il finit, and it is wrong. And notice the sound: the singular forms end in a nasal vowel, while ils vendent sounds the d, so the plural is audibly different from the singular. That is a real listening cue.

Verb	English	Note
vendre	to sell	vendre quelque chose à quelqu'un
attendre	to wait for	The "for" is inside the verb: j'attends le bus
entendre	to hear	Hearing, not listening; écouter is listening
répondre à	to answer	Takes à: je réponds à la question
perdre	to lose	je perds, il perd
descendre	to go down, to get off	je descends du bus
rendre	to give back, to hand in	je rends les devoirs

Attendre is the mirror image of the verbs in the last lesson. Regarder contained an "at" you must not repeat; attendre contains a "for" you must not repeat. J'attends le bus is I am waiting for the bus, and j'attends pour le bus is an English sentence wearing French clothes. Meanwhile répondre does need à, because in French you answer to a question.

And prendre (to take) is not regular, despite looking like a perfect -re verb: je prends, tu prends, il prend, nous prenons, vous prenez, ils prennent. Its compounds behave identically and you will use them constantly: apprendre (to learn) and comprendre (to understand). Je ne comprends pas may be the single most useful sentence in this course.

All three families side by side

Pronoun	parler	finir	vendre
je	parle	finis	vends
tu	parles	finis	vends
il, elle, on	parle	finit	vend
nous	parlons	finissons	vendons
vous	parlez	finissez	vendez
ils, elles	parlent	finissent	vendent

Three things are constant down every column: nous always ends in -ons, vous always ends in -ez, and ils always ends in -ent. Those three endings are true for essentially every French verb in the present tense, regular or not, with a tiny handful of exceptions such as vous êtes, vous faites, vous dites, ils sont, ils ont, ils vont and ils font. Learn those seven exceptions and the rest of the language obeys.

Bottom line: what varies between the families is the singular. The plural endings are nearly universal.

Common misconceptions

• "All -ir verbs take -iss- in the plural." Only the regular ones. Partir, sortir, dormir, servir, sentir, mentir and venir do not, and they are extremely common.
• "Il vend needs a t on the end." It does not. Regular -re verbs have no ending at all in the third person singular.
• "J'attends pour le bus is the careful full version." It is wrong. Attendre already means to wait for.
• "Entendre and écouter are interchangeable." Entendre is to hear, which happens to you; écouter is to listen, which you choose to do. J'entends la musique mais je ne l'écoute pas.
• "Prendre is a regular -re verb." It is not: nous prenons, ils prennent. Neither are its compounds apprendre and comprendre, which behave the same irregular way.

Summing up

Regular -ir verbs like finir take -is, -is, -it, -issons, -issez, -issent, and the -iss- in the plural is the badge of the regular group; many of these verbs are built from adjectives and mean "to become". A second group ending in -ir, headed by partir, sortir and dormir, drops the final stem consonant in the singular and restores it in the plural, with no -iss- anywhere. Regular -re verbs like vendre take -s, -s, nothing, -ons, -ez, -ent, and the third person singular really does have a bare stem. Attendre contains its own "for" and répondre needs à. Prendre and its compounds apprendre and comprendre look regular and are not. Across all three families, nous is -ons, vous is -ez and ils is -ent, with only seven exceptions in the whole language. Next lesson takes any of these sentences and does the two things you most need to do to one: deny it, and ask it.

Sources

1. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe finir. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
2. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe vendre. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French conjugation: the three groups. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Le Robert. Dictionnaire de français: verb entries and conjugation tables. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com

There are three ways to ask "Do you speak French?" in French, and all three are correct. Tu parles français ? Est-ce que tu parles français ? Parlez-vous français ? They differ in register the way "Got a minute?", "Do you have a minute?" and "Might I trouble you for a moment?" differ in English. Choosing among them tells your listener something about you before they even answer.

Negation: two words that wrap the verb

English negates with a helper: "I do not speak". French has no auxiliary "do" at all. Instead it puts ne in front of the conjugated verb and pas behind it, so the verb sits inside a bracket.

• Je parle français. becomes Je ne parle pas français. I do not speak French.
• Elle a un frère. becomes Elle n'a pas de frère. She has no brother. (Note the elision and the pas de rule from Lesson 6.)
• Nous finissons à cinq heures. becomes Nous ne finissons pas à cinq heures.

When there are two verbs, the bracket goes around the conjugated one and the infinitive stays outside: Je ne veux pas partir. (I do not want to leave.) Elle n'aime pas attendre. (She does not like waiting.) Beginners often try to wrap the infinitive instead; it is the conjugated verb that gets bracketed.

The rest of the negative family

Swap pas for another word and you get a different negative, with the same wrapping structure.

Structure	Meaning	Example	English
ne ... pas	not	Je ne fume pas.	I do not smoke.
ne ... jamais	never	Il ne travaille jamais.	He never works.
ne ... plus	no longer, not any more	Elle n'habite plus ici.	She does not live here any more.
ne ... rien	nothing	Je ne comprends rien.	I understand nothing.
ne ... personne	nobody	Nous ne voyons personne.	We see nobody.
ne ... pas encore	not yet	Ils ne sont pas encore arrivés.	They have not arrived yet.
ne ... que	only	Je n'ai que dix euros.	I only have ten euros.
ne ... ni ... ni	neither ... nor	Je n'aime ni le thé ni le café.	I like neither tea nor coffee.

Two notes. Ne ... que is not really a negative at all; it means "only", and it is the normal way to say it. And when rien or personne is the subject of the sentence, it moves to the front but the ne stays: Rien ne marche. (Nothing works.) Personne ne vient. (Nobody is coming.) The ne looks orphaned there and it is not optional.

Remember also that personne is doing double duty: une personne is a person, and personne with no article, paired with ne, is nobody.

The ne that disappears

In ordinary spoken French the ne is very often dropped. You will hear Je sais pas (I don't know), C'est pas grave (It doesn't matter), J'ai pas faim (I'm not hungry), Il vient jamais (He never comes). This is not sloppy teenage speech; it is how most people speak most of the time, including adults in relaxed conversation.

It is also not how anyone writes. In an essay, a letter, an exam or any formal register, the ne is compulsory and leaving it out is an error. So: recognise the dropped ne when you hear it, and write the full form always.

Remember: pas is the piece that carries the meaning in speech; ne is the piece that carries the grammar in writing. Both matter, in different places.

Three ways to ask a question

Register	How	Example	Where you meet it
Intonation	Statement word order; the voice rises at the end	Tu parles français ?	Everyday speech, with friends, in shops
est-ce que	Put est-ce que in front of the statement; change nothing else	Est-ce que tu parles français ?	Neutral. Safe in speech and in writing
Inversion	Swap verb and subject pronoun, joined by a hyphen	Parlez-vous français ?	Formal speech, writing, exams

The middle one is the workhorse for a learner. Est-ce que is a fixed block that literally means "is it that", and it requires no rearrangement whatsoever: take any statement, put it in front, and you have a question. It elides before a vowel: Est-ce qu'il est là ?

Inversion has two mechanical details. First, the hyphen is compulsory: parlez-vous, not parlez vous. Second, when the verb ends in a vowel and the pronoun begins with one, French inserts a -t- to keep them apart: Parle-t-il ? (Does he speak?), A-t-elle un frère ? (Does she have a brother?), Y a-t-il un problème ? (Is there a problem?). That t means nothing; it is there purely so that two vowels do not collide.

With a noun subject, inversion needs the noun first and then a pronoun copy: Marie parle-t-elle français ? Literally, Marie speaks-she French? This is why most people reach for est-ce que instead.

The question words

French	English	In each register
où	where	Tu habites où ? / Où est-ce que tu habites ? / Où habitez-vous ?
quand	when	Tu pars quand ? / Quand est-ce que tu pars ? / Quand partez-vous ?
comment	how	Tu vas comment ? / Comment est-ce que tu vas ? / Comment allez-vous ?
pourquoi	why	Pourquoi tu pleures ? / Pourquoi est-ce que tu pleures ? / Pourquoi pleurez-vous ?
combien (de)	how much, how many	Ça coûte combien ? / Combien est-ce que ça coûte ? / Combien coûte ce livre ?
qui	who	Qui est là ? (no est-ce que needed when qui is the subject)
que, quoi	what	Tu fais quoi ? / Qu'est-ce que tu fais ? / Que faites-vous ?

Notice the pattern in the first column of examples: in the casual register the question word usually goes to the end. Tu habites où ? is completely normal French and is what you will hear far more often than Où habites-tu ?

Que is the awkward one. As the object of a verb it appears as que with inversion (Que faites-vous ?), as quoi at the end of a casual question (Tu fais quoi ?), and inside the block qu'est-ce que in the neutral register. And to ask what something is, the fixed phrase is Qu'est-ce que c'est ? Learn it whole; taking it apart is not worth your time this year.

quel, the question word that agrees

Quel means which or what, and unlike the other question words it is an adjective, so it agrees with the noun it asks about.

Form	Used with	Example	English
quel	masculine singular	Quel âge as-tu ?	How old are you?
quelle	feminine singular	Quelle heure est-il ?	What time is it?
quels	masculine plural	Quels livres préfères-tu ?	Which books do you prefer?
quelles	feminine plural	Quelles matières aimes-tu ?	Which subjects do you like?

All four are pronounced identically, which is a small mercy in speech and a real trap in writing.

Yes, no, and the third answer English does not have

French has two words for yes. Oui answers an ordinary question. Si answers a negative question or contradicts a negative statement.

• Tu viens ? Oui. (Are you coming? Yes.)
• Tu ne viens pas ? Si, je viens. (Aren't you coming? Yes I am.)
• Tu n'aimes pas le chocolat. Si ! (You don't like chocolate. Yes I do!)

English has to say "yes I am" or "yes I do" to contradict, and even then it is ambiguous. French settles it in one syllable. There is also the tag n'est-ce pas ? (isn't it, aren't you, don't they), which covers every English tag question at once, though in speech people more often just say non ? or hein ?

So what?: if someone asks you a negative question and you answer oui, you have probably said the opposite of what you meant. The word you want is si.

A worked pair

Start with a plain statement: Vous habitez à Lyon. (You live in Lyon.) Turn it into a question three ways: Vous habitez à Lyon ? Est-ce que vous habitez à Lyon ? Habitez-vous à Lyon ? Now make it negative: Vous n'habitez pas à Lyon. Now make the negative into a question: Vous n'habitez pas à Lyon ? or N'habitez-vous pas à Lyon ? The ne and pas keep their grip on the verb even when the verb and pronoun swap places, which is why the inverted version looks so crowded and why almost nobody says it.

Change one input and the answer changes. If the question had been Vous habitez à Lyon ? the answer meaning yes is oui. Because the question was Vous n'habitez pas à Lyon ? the answer meaning yes is si.

Common misconceptions

• "French must have a word for do in questions and negatives." It has none. Est-ce que fills the question slot; nothing fills the negative slot, because ne and pas do the work themselves.
• "Dropping ne is bad French." In speech it is the majority pattern and perfectly normal. In writing it is an error. Both statements are true at once.
• "Inversion is the correct question form and the others are shortcuts." All three are correct. Inversion is the most formal, not the most correct, and in casual conversation it can sound stiff.
• "The -t- in a-t-il means something." It means nothing. It is there only to separate two vowels.
• "Si always means if." It also means yes in answer to a negative, and the two uses are unrelated in practice.
• "Quel never changes because question words are invariable." Quel is an adjective and has four written forms, all pronounced the same.

Looking back

French negates by wrapping the conjugated verb in ne and pas, with no auxiliary anywhere, and the same frame carries jamais, plus, rien, personne, pas encore, que and ni ... ni. When rien or personne is the subject it moves to the front and the ne stays behind. In speech the ne routinely vanishes; in writing it never may. Questions come in three registers: rising intonation, the fixed block est-ce que, and inversion with its compulsory hyphen and its meaningless -t-. The question words où, quand, comment, pourquoi, combien, qui and que work in all three, and in casual speech they often sit at the end of the sentence. Quel agrees like an adjective in four written forms that sound the same. And French has a second yes, si, for contradicting a negative. Module 5 puts all of this to work on numbers, time, movement and food.

Sources

1. Wikipédia. (2024). Négation en français. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French grammar: negation and interrogation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Académie française. Dire, ne pas dire: notes on question forms and the omission of ne. Académie française. academie-francaise.fr
4. BBC Bitesize. French: asking questions and forming negatives. BBC. bbc.co.uk

In France, seventy is soixante-dix: sixty-ten. Eighty is quatre-vingts: four twenties. Ninety-seven is quatre-vingt-dix-sept, which unpacks as four twenties, ten, seven. This is a fossil of a counting system based on twenty rather than ten, and it survives in French where it died elsewhere. Cross into Belgium or French-speaking Switzerland and you will hear septante for seventy and nonante for ninety, which are the tidy forms France never adopted. Both are correct French. Only one is what you will hear in Paris.

Zero to twenty

0	zéro	7	sept	14	quatorze
1	un, une	8	huit	15	quinze
2	deux	9	neuf	16	seize
3	trois	10	dix	17	dix-sept
4	quatre	11	onze	18	dix-huit
5	cinq	12	douze	19	dix-neuf
6	six	13	treize	20	vingt

Un is the only number that agrees: un livre, une table. Everything else is invariable. And three of these numbers change their pronunciation depending on what follows, which is Module 1 again:

• six and dix: final consonant pronounced when the number stands alone ("seess", "deess"), silent before a consonant (six livres is "see leevr"), and a z in liaison (dix ans is "dee-ZAHN").
• huit: t pronounced alone, usually silent before a consonant (huit jours), and linked before a vowel.
• neuf: normally an f, but a v in the two fixed phrases neuf ans and neuf heures.

Twenty-one to sixty-nine, and then the strange part

From 21 to 69 the pattern is straightforward: the ten, then the unit, joined by a hyphen. The one oddity is that the numbers ending in 1 insert et: vingt et un (21), trente et un (31), quarante et un, cinquante et un, soixante et un. The tens are vingt (20), trente (30), quarante (40), cinquante (50), soixante (60).

Then France runs out of words for tens and starts building.

Number	France	Literally	Belgium and Switzerland
70	soixante-dix	sixty-ten	septante
71	soixante et onze	sixty and eleven	septante et un
75	soixante-quinze	sixty-fifteen	septante-cinq
80	quatre-vingts	four twenties	quatre-vingts, or huitante in parts of Switzerland
81	quatre-vingt-un	four twenties one	quatre-vingt-un
90	quatre-vingt-dix	four twenties ten	nonante
97	quatre-vingt-dix-sept	four twenties ten seven	nonante-sept
99	quatre-vingt-dix-neuf	four twenties ten nine	nonante-neuf

Two spelling details that get marked in exams. Quatre-vingts takes an s only when nothing follows it; the moment another number is attached the s goes: quatre-vingt-un, quatre-vingt-dix. And 81 has no et, unlike 21 and 71.

Key idea: from 70 to 99, French is doing arithmetic out loud. Read quatre-vingt-dix-sept as 4 times 20, plus 10, plus 7, and it stops being frightening.

Hundreds, thousands and beyond

• cent (100), deux cents (200), but deux cent un (201). Same rule as quatre-vingts: the s vanishes when another number follows.
• mille (1000) never takes an s: deux mille, dix mille.
• un million, un milliard (a billion) are nouns and take de: deux millions de personnes.
• French writes decimals with a comma and thousands with a space: 3,14 and 1 000 000.

Days, months and dates

Days: lundi, mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, dimanche. Months: janvier, février, mars, avril, mai, juin, juillet, août, septembre, octobre, novembre, décembre. All of them are written with a small letter in French, which trips up English speakers on every piece of written work. The French week begins on Monday, so a French calendar starts its columns with lundi.

A date is built as le plus the number plus the month, with the day of the week in front if you want it, and with no preposition anywhere:

• le 14 juillet 1789, the storming of the Bastille, still the date of the French national holiday.
• le 11 novembre 1918, the armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War, a public holiday in France.
• lundi 3 mars, Monday 3 March.

The numbers are ordinary cardinals with one exception: the first of the month is le premier, written le 1er. So le premier mai, the first of May, and then le deux mai, le trois mai. Note also that the numeric format runs day first: 14/07/1789. An American reading a French form as month-first will book the wrong flight.

Seasons take different prepositions, which simply have to be learned: au printemps (in spring), en été (in summer), en automne (in autumn), en hiver (in winter). Spring is the odd one out because printemps begins with a consonant.

Telling the time

The question is Quelle heure est-il ? (What time is it?) and the answer always begins Il est.

Time	French	Note
1.00	Il est une heure.	une, not un: heure is feminine
2.00	Il est deux heures.	heures is plural from two onwards
3.15	Il est trois heures et quart.	or trois heures quinze
4.30	Il est quatre heures et demie.	demie agrees with heure
5.45	Il est six heures moins le quart.	literally six o'clock less the quarter
6.50	Il est sept heures moins dix.	ten to seven
12.00 midday	Il est midi.	no heures
12.00 midnight	Il est minuit.	no heures
12.30 midday	Il est midi et demi.	demi with no e: midi is masculine

That last row is a genuine spelling trap and a favourite of examiners. Demie takes an e after heure, which is feminine, and demi takes none after midi and minuit, which are masculine.

To say in the morning, afternoon or evening, add du matin, de l'après-midi or du soir: huit heures du matin, huit heures du soir.

The official clock

France runs on the twenty-four hour clock for everything official: timetables, television listings, cinema times, opening hours, appointments. A train leaving at a quarter to eight in the evening is announced as 19h45, said dix-neuf heures quarante-cinq. Note the format: the letter h replaces the colon, so 8h30, 14h00, 19h45.

With the twenty-four hour clock you do not use et quart, et demie or moins. You read the minutes straight out: quatorze heures trente, not quatorze heures et demie. In conversation people switch back to the twelve-hour forms: the same train is huit heures moins le quart when you are telling a friend about it.

To ask when something happens: À quelle heure commence le cours ? (What time does the class start?) Answer: Le cours commence à huit heures. The preposition is à.

The point: two clocks coexist. The official one is exact and numeric; the conversational one uses quarters and halves. Learn to read both and produce whichever fits the setting.

Ordinals, briefly

Add -ième to the number: deuxième (second), troisième, quatrième, cinquième, dixième. First is irregular: premier and première. These name the floors of a building and the arrondissements of Paris, so le cinquième étage is the fifth floor and le sixième arrondissement is a district of Paris. One warning: French counts floors from the rez-de-chaussée, the ground floor, so the French premier étage is the American second floor.

Common misconceptions

• "Septante and nonante are wrong." They are standard in Belgium and Switzerland and perfectly correct French. They are simply not used in France.
• "Days and months take capitals as in English." They do not. lundi, mars, always lowercase.
• "Il est une heure should be un heure." Heure is feminine, so the number agrees: une heure.
• "Quatre-vingts always keeps its s." Only when nothing follows: quatre-vingts but quatre-vingt-deux. Cent behaves the same way.
• "The premier étage is the ground floor." The ground floor is the rez-de-chaussée. The premier étage is one flight up.

Recap

French counts in tens up to sixty and then switches to a base-twenty system for 70 to 99, so soixante-dix is sixty-ten and quatre-vingt-dix-sept is four twenties, ten and seven, while Belgium and Switzerland use the tidier septante and nonante. The numbers ending in one take et up to 71 but not at 81, and quatre-vingts and cent lose their s whenever another number follows. Six, dix, huit and neuf change their final sound according to what comes next. Days and months are written in lowercase, dates run day then month with le premier for the first, and the numeric format is day first. Time is asked with Quelle heure est-il ? and answered with Il est, using et quart, et demie and moins in conversation and the plain twenty-four hour numbers, written with an h, in anything official. Next lesson gets you moving, with the verb that expresses both going somewhere and doing something soon.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French numerals. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Nombres en français. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). 24-hour clock. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Larousse. Dictionnaire de français: adjectifs numéraux et accord de vingt et cent. Éditions Larousse. larousse.fr

Look at the present tense of aller, to go: je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont. Three completely different stems, v-, all- and v- again in a different shape, in one small verb. That is not sloppiness. French assembled this verb out of the wreckage of more than one Latin verb, and the pieces never merged. Linguists call a verb like this suppletive, the same phenomenon that gives English "go" and "went". You cannot derive these forms. You memorise them, and then you use them constantly, because aller does two enormous jobs.

The forms, and the first job

French	English	Sounds roughly like
je vais	I go, I am going	zhuh VAY
tu vas	you go	tu VA
il, elle, on va	he, she, we goes, go	eel VA
nous allons	we go	noo-za-LOHN
vous allez	you go	voo-za-LAY
ils, elles vont	they go	eel VOHN

The first job is literal movement: Je vais à l'école. (I am going to school.) The second job is health, which you already met in Lesson 4: Comment allez-vous ? Je vais bien, merci. French asks how you are going, and you answer that you are going well. The third job is the near future, and it gets its own section below.

Which preposition goes with which place

English uses "to" for everything. French chooses, and the choice depends on what kind of place it is.

Kind of place	Preposition	Example	English
a town or city	à	Je vais à Paris, à Dakar, à Montréal.	to Paris, Dakar, Montreal
a feminine country	en	Nous allons en France, en Italie, en Espagne.	to France, Italy, Spain
a masculine country	au	Il va au Canada, au Japon, au Sénégal.	to Canada, Japan, Senegal
a plural country	aux	Elles vont aux États-Unis, aux Pays-Bas.	to the United States, the Netherlands
a country starting with a vowel	en	en Iran, en Israël, en Angola	even when the country is masculine
a building or shop, with an article	à plus the article	au cinéma, à la piscine, à l'hôpital, aux toilettes	to the cinema, pool, hospital
a person's place or business	chez	chez moi, chez Marie, chez le dentiste	at my place, at Marie's, at the dentist's

How do you know whether a country is feminine? A reliable rule: countries ending in -e are feminine, and the rest are masculine. La France, l'Italie, l'Espagne, la Chine, la Belgique, la Suisse are feminine; le Canada, le Portugal, le Japon, le Maroc, le Brésil are masculine. The famous exceptions are le Mexique, le Cambodge and le Zimbabwe, which end in -e and are masculine anyway.

Chez deserves a moment because English has nothing like it. It means at or to the home or premises of somebody: chez moi (at my place), chez toi, chez nous, chez mes grands-parents, chez le médecin (at the doctor's), chez le coiffeur (at the hairdresser's). It always takes a person, a person's name, or a stressed pronoun, never a plain place.

Worth holding on to: à for towns, en for feminine countries, au for masculine ones, aux for plural ones, chez for people. That single table covers nearly every "to" you will need this year.

The near future: aller plus an infinitive

Here is the second reason aller is worth memorising. Put a conjugated aller in front of any infinitive and you have the future, exactly as English does with "going to".

French	English
Je vais manger.	I am going to eat.
Tu vas travailler ce soir ?	Are you going to work tonight?
Il va pleuvoir.	It is going to rain.
Nous allons partir à huit heures.	We are going to leave at eight.
Vous allez comprendre.	You are going to understand.
Elles vont finir demain.	They are going to finish tomorrow.

The second verb never changes: it stays in the infinitive, whatever the subject. To make it negative, wrap ne and pas around the conjugated aller, not around the infinitive: Je ne vais pas manger. (I am not going to eat.) To make it a question, use any of the three registers from the last lesson: Tu vas partir ? / Est-ce que tu vas partir ? / Vas-tu partir ?

French does have a separate simple future tense, formed with endings on the infinitive (je mangerai, I will eat). It belongs to a later course. What matters now is that in everyday speech the aller future is used constantly, for anything from the next five minutes to next year, and it will carry you through every conversation you have this year.

Useful time markers to attach to it: demain (tomorrow), après-demain (the day after tomorrow), ce soir (this evening), ce week-end, la semaine prochaine (next week), l'année prochaine, bientôt (soon), tout de suite (right away), dans deux jours (in two days). Note that dans plus a period means "in" as in "after", while il y a plus a period means "ago", as Lesson 6 explained.

The city, and getting around it

French	English	French	English
la ville	town, city	la boulangerie	bakery
le centre-ville	town centre	la pharmacie	chemist, pharmacy
le quartier	neighbourhood	le bureau de poste	post office
la rue	street	la banque	bank
la place	square	le marché	market
la gare	railway station	la mairie	town hall
la station de métro	metro station	la bibliothèque	library
l'arrêt de bus	bus stop	le musée	museum

Ask with a greeting first, always: Pardon, madame, où est la gare, s'il vous plaît ? (Excuse me, madam, where is the station please?) Or, more openly, Excusez-moi, je cherche la poste. (Excuse me, I am looking for the post office.) Remember from Lesson 10 that chercher already contains the "for".

The answers come in a small set of phrases:

• Tout droit. Straight ahead. (Do not confuse with à droite, to the right.)
• À droite / à gauche. To the right, to the left.
• Prenez la première rue à droite. Take the first street on the right.
• Continuez jusqu'au feu. Keep going as far as the traffic light.
• Traversez la place. Cross the square.
• C'est en face de la mairie. It is opposite the town hall.
• C'est à côté de la banque. It is next to the bank.
• C'est au coin de la rue. It is on the corner.
• C'est à cinq minutes à pied. It is five minutes on foot.

The position words are worth a list of their own, because they all take de: près de (near), loin de (far from), à côté de (next to), en face de (opposite), au coin de (at the corner of). And remember that de plus le contracts, so it is en face du musée and à côté des magasins.

How you get there

French splits transport by whether you are inside the vehicle or on top of it. Things you climb inside take en; things you sit astride take à.

en (inside it)	à (on it, or on you)
en voiture (by car), en bus, en train, en métro, en avion, en taxi, en bateau	à pied (on foot), à vélo (by bike), à moto, à cheval (on horseback)

You will also hear à bicyclette and, from some speakers, en vélo. Both exist; à vélo is what a textbook and an examiner will expect.

The upshot: aller plus a preposition tells someone where you are heading, and aller plus an infinitive tells them what you are about to do. Two structures, one verb, and almost all of your everyday planning.

A short exchange in the street

• Pardon, monsieur. Je cherche la bibliothèque. (Excuse me, sir. I am looking for the library.)
• Vous allez tout droit jusqu'à la place, puis vous prenez la deuxième rue à gauche. (You go straight ahead as far as the square, then you take the second street on the left.)
• C'est loin ? (Is it far?)
• Non, c'est à dix minutes à pied. C'est en face de la mairie. (No, it is ten minutes on foot. It is opposite the town hall.)
• Merci beaucoup. Je vais y aller maintenant. (Thank you very much. I am going to go there now.)
• Je vous en prie. Bonne journée ! (You are welcome. Have a good day!)

Common misconceptions

• "Aller is a regular -er verb." It is one of the most irregular in the language, built from more than one Latin source: je vais, nous allons, ils vont.
• "Je vais à France." Countries do not take à. It is en France for a feminine country and au Canada for a masculine one; à is for towns.
• "Tout droit means to the right." It means straight ahead. To the right is à droite, and mixing them up is how tourists end up in the wrong arrondissement.
• "In the near future the second verb has to agree with the subject." It never changes. Only aller is conjugated; the second verb stays in the infinitive.
• "Chez can be used for any place." Only for people: chez moi, chez le médecin. A shop with a normal name takes à la or au.

The short version

Aller is suppletive, so its forms have to be memorised: je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont. It carries three jobs: going somewhere, being well, and the near future. Going somewhere means choosing a preposition, and the choice is by type of place: à for towns, en for feminine countries and for any country starting with a vowel, au for masculine countries, aux for plural ones, à plus the article for buildings, and chez for people. The near future is simply aller plus an unchanged infinitive, with ne and pas wrapping aller when it is negative. In town, ask with a greeting, listen for tout droit, à droite, à gauche, en face de and à côté de, and remember that every one of those position phrases ends in de and therefore contracts with le and les. Transport takes en when you get inside and à when you sit on top. Next lesson brings the other giant of everyday French, faire, and takes you to the table.

Sources

1. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe aller. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
2. Le Robert. Aller: définition et emplois. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com
3. Wiktionary contributors. aller. Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French grammar: prepositions and verb constructions. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Ask about the weather in French and you are asking what the sky is manufacturing. Quel temps fait-il ? means, word for word, what weather does it make? And the answer is Il fait froid: it makes cold. English says the weather is something. French says it does something. That verb, faire, then goes on to appear in more everyday expressions than any verb in the language except être and avoir, and it is the second half of this lesson's job, because the other half is at the table.

faire, and its two odd forms

French	English	Sounds roughly like
je fais	I do, I make	zhuh FAY
tu fais	you do	tu FAY
il, elle, on fait	he, she, we does, do	eel FAY
nous faisons	we do	noo fuh-ZOHN
vous faites	you do	voo FET
ils, elles font	they do	eel FOHN

Two forms are worth flagging. Nous faisons is spelled with ai and pronounced with a plain neutral vowel, "fuh-ZOHN", which is unique in French and catches everybody. And vous faites is one of the seven verbs in the entire language whose vous form does not end in -ez; the others are vous êtes and vous dites.

The basic meanings are do and make, and French does not separate them: Qu'est-ce que tu fais ? (What are you doing?) Je fais mes devoirs. (I am doing my homework.) Elle fait un gâteau. (She is making a cake.)

The weather

French	English	French	English
Il fait beau.	The weather is nice.	Il fait du vent.	It is windy.
Il fait mauvais.	The weather is bad.	Il fait du soleil.	It is sunny.
Il fait chaud.	It is hot.	Il fait du brouillard.	It is foggy.
Il fait froid.	It is cold.	Il fait 20 degrés.	It is 20 degrees.
Il fait frais.	It is chilly.	Il pleut.	It is raining.
Il fait doux.	It is mild.	Il neige.	It is snowing.

Not everything uses faire. Il pleut (from pleuvoir) and il neige (from neiger) are their own verbs, and clouds get Il y a des nuages. The pattern to remember is that faire covers general conditions and temperature, while specific falling things get their own verb. Temperatures, of course, are in Celsius: il fait 30 degrés is a hot day, not an impossible one.

What faire does that do does not

A large set of activities in French is expressed with faire de plus the article, where English uses a plain verb or "go".

French	English
faire du sport	to do sport, to exercise
faire du vélo	to go cycling
faire de la natation	to go swimming
faire de la randonnée	to go hiking
faire du piano	to play the piano, in the sense of studying it
faire les courses	to do the food shopping
faire la cuisine	to cook
faire la vaisselle	to do the washing up
faire le ménage	to do the housework
faire la queue	to queue, to stand in line
faire attention	to pay attention, to be careful
faire un voyage	to take a trip

Notice the overlap with Lesson 10. For sports and instruments you now have two options: jouer au football and faire du football both work, as do jouer du piano and faire du piano. The nuance is small: jouer leans towards playing, faire leans towards practising or doing the activity. For an activity with no game to play, such as swimming or hiking, only faire works.

What matters here: the de in faire du sport is the partitive article, not a preposition. That is why it changes with gender: du sport, de la natation, de l'équitation. Which brings us straight to the table.

Three ways to talk about food

Put fromage (cheese) into three sentences and watch the article change the meaning completely.

French	English	Which article, and why
J'aime le fromage.	I like cheese.	Definite: a general statement about cheese as a category.
Je mange du fromage.	I am eating some cheese.	Partitive: an unmeasured amount of it.
Je voudrais un fromage.	I would like a cheese.	Indefinite: one whole countable object, a whole cheese.

The test is simple. If you could put the word "some" or "any" in front of the English, French wants the partitive. If the English sentence is a general truth about liking, hating or preferring, French wants the definite article. If you are counting whole objects, French wants un, une or des.

The partitive forms are du (masculine), de la (feminine), de l' (before a vowel) and des (plural): du pain (some bread), de la confiture (some jam), de l'eau (some water), des fruits (some fruit). English can drop "some" and French cannot. Je mange pain is not a sentence.

Quantities strip the article away

Here is the rule that makes the partitive finally click. After an expression of quantity, the article disappears entirely and you are left with plain de.

Without quantity	With quantity	English
du pain	beaucoup de pain	a lot of bread
de l'eau	un peu d'eau	a little water
du sucre	trop de sucre	too much sugar
des pommes	un kilo de pommes	a kilo of apples
du lait	une bouteille de lait	a bottle of milk
du jambon	une tranche de jambon	a slice of ham
du café	une tasse de café	a cup of coffee

So beaucoup du pain is wrong; it is beaucoup de pain. Add the negative rule from Lesson 6 and you have three related facts in one system: the partitive is du, de la, de l' or des; after a quantity it is plain de; after a negative it is plain de.

In short: the partitive shrinks to bare de whenever something else is already telling you how much there is.

Food and meals

French	English	French	English
le pain, la baguette	bread, baguette	la viande	meat
le beurre	butter	le poulet	chicken
la confiture	jam	le poisson	fish
le fromage	cheese	les légumes	vegetables
un œuf, des œufs	an egg, eggs	les haricots verts	green beans
le lait	milk	les pommes de terre	potatoes
l'eau	water	les pâtes, le riz	pasta, rice
le jus d'orange	orange juice	la pomme, la fraise	apple, strawberry

One pronunciation detail here is a small delight. Un œuf is said "uhn UHF", with the f clearly sounded. Des œufs is said "day-Z-UH", with the f silent. Same word, and the plural quietly drops a consonant that the singular keeps. The same happens with un bœuf and des bœufs.

The meals in France are le petit déjeuner (breakfast), le déjeuner (lunch), le goûter (the afternoon snack, taken seriously by children) and le dîner (dinner). Careful outside France: in Belgium, in Switzerland and in Quebec the same three meals are usually called déjeuner, dîner and souper, so le déjeuner there is breakfast. Getting this wrong will make you an hour or five early.

At a café or restaurant

• Je voudrais un café, s'il vous plaît. I would like a coffee, please. (Je voudrais is a polite form; je veux, I want, sounds blunt.)
• Vous avez choisi ? Have you chosen?
• Comme entrée, je prends la soupe. Comme plat, le poulet. As a starter I will have the soup. For the main course, the chicken.
• Et comme dessert ? And for dessert?
• Une carafe d'eau, s'il vous plaît. A jug of tap water, please. It is free in French restaurants and you are entitled to ask for it.
• L'addition, s'il vous plaît. The bill, please.

A false friend to disarm now: le menu in French is not the list of dishes. It is a fixed-price set meal, usually a starter, a main and a dessert for one price. The list of dishes is la carte, which is why ordering individual dishes is called eating à la carte. Asking a French waiter for "the menu" and expecting a list is a small comedy that plays out daily.

Common misconceptions

• "Le temps est froid is how you say it is cold." The normal expression is Il fait froid. Weather in French is made, not described.
• "Beaucoup du pain is correct because bread takes du." No. Any expression of quantity strips the article: beaucoup de pain.
• "J'aime du café means I like coffee." It does not work. Liking is general, so it takes the definite article: J'aime le café.
• "Nous faisons is pronounced with the ai of fait." It is not. It is "fuh-ZOHN", with a neutral vowel, and it is the only word in French that does this.
• "Le menu means the list of dishes." It means a set meal at a fixed price. The list is la carte.
• "Le déjeuner always means lunch." In France yes; in Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec it is usually breakfast.

What to carry forward

Faire runs je fais, tu fais, il fait, nous faisons, vous faites, ils font, with a neutral vowel in faisons and an exceptional vous faites. It carries the weather, where French makes conditions rather than being them, though rain and snow keep their own verbs. It carries dozens of activities and chores in the pattern faire de plus the article, and that de is the partitive, which is why it changes with gender. At the table, the article is the meaning: le fromage for cheese in general, du fromage for some cheese, un fromage for a whole one. Any expression of quantity, and any negative, reduces all of that to plain de. And when you sit down to order, remember that the menu is the deal and the carte is the list. Module 6 turns to what you do every morning, and then to everything you did yesterday.

Sources

1. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe faire. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
2. Le Robert. Faire: définition, locutions et emplois. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com
3. Wikipédia. (2024). Article partitif. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Partitive article. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. Faire. CNRTL, CNRS. cnrtl.fr

A French dictionary lists lever and se lever as two separate entries. The first means to lift something: lever la main, to raise your hand. The second means to get up in the morning. Nothing has changed except a two-letter word in front of the verb, and that word turns the action back on the person doing it. There are several hundred verbs in French that behave this way, and almost everything you do before eight in the morning is one of them.

The reflexive pronouns

Subject	Pronoun	se laver (to wash oneself)	English
je	me (m')	je me lave	I wash, I get washed
tu	te (t')	tu te laves	you wash
il, elle, on	se (s')	il se lave	he washes
nous	nous	nous nous lavons	we wash
vous	vous	vous vous lavez	you wash
ils, elles	se (s')	ils se lavent	they wash

Three mechanical points. The pronoun always matches the subject, so it changes every time the subject does. It always sits immediately before the verb. And me, te and se elide before a vowel or silent h: je m'appelle, tu t'habilles, elle s'amuse.

The nous nous and vous vous forms look like typing errors and are not. Nous nous levons à sept heures. We get up at seven. Two identical words in a row, doing two different jobs: the first is the subject, the second is the reflexive pronoun.

Negatives, questions and infinitives

The pronoun is glued to the verb, so everything else has to arrange itself around the pair.

• Negative: ne goes in front of the pronoun, not in front of the verb. Je ne me lève pas tôt. I do not get up early. Elle ne s'ennuie jamais. She is never bored.
• Question by intonation or est-ce que: nothing moves. Tu te lèves à quelle heure ? Est-ce que vous vous levez tôt ?
• Question by inversion: only the subject pronoun moves; the reflexive stays put. Te lèves-tu tôt ? Comment vous appelez-vous ? That second one you have been using since Lesson 4 without knowing why it was built that way.
• With an infinitive: the pronoun goes in front of the infinitive and still matches the subject. Je vais me lever à six heures. I am going to get up at six. Nous devons nous dépêcher. We have to hurry. Writing je vais se lever is the standard error here.

The point: the reflexive pronoun belongs to the subject and travels with the verb it applies to, which means it lands before the infinitive when there is one.

The morning, in order

French	English	French	English
se réveiller	to wake up	se dépêcher	to hurry
se lever	to get up	se promener	to go for a walk
se doucher	to have a shower	se reposer	to rest
se laver	to wash	s'amuser	to have fun, to enjoy oneself
se brosser les dents	to brush one's teeth	s'ennuyer	to be bored
s'habiller	to get dressed	se coucher	to go to bed
se préparer	to get ready	s'endormir	to fall asleep

Two spelling notes. Se lever takes the accent change from Lesson 10: je me lève, tu te lèves, il se lève, but nous nous levons and vous vous levez. S'appeler doubles its l for the same reason: je m'appelle, nous nous appelons. And s'endormir belongs to the partir group from Lesson 11, so it goes je m'endors, nous nous endormons.

Now the detail that connects back to Lesson 9. With parts of the body, French uses the definite article, not a possessive, because the reflexive pronoun has already said whose body it is: Je me lave les mains (I wash my hands), Elle se brosse les cheveux (She brushes her hair), Il se brosse les dents. Writing je lave mes mains is not wrong so much as oddly literal, in the way "I wash the hands of myself" would be in English.

Stringing a day together

The sequencing words: d'abord (first), ensuite and puis (then), après (afterwards), enfin (finally), vers (at about), tous les jours (every day), d'habitude (usually), le matin / l'après-midi / le soir (in the morning, afternoon, evening).

Here is a whole routine, built from this lesson and everything before it:

D'habitude, je me réveille à six heures et demie, mais je me lève vers sept heures moins le quart. D'abord, je me douche et je m'habille. Ensuite, je prends mon petit déjeuner: du pain, du beurre et de la confiture. Je me brosse les dents, puis je vais au lycée à vélo. Les cours commencent à huit heures. À midi, nous mangeons à la cantine. Le soir, je fais mes devoirs, je me repose un peu et je regarde une série. Je ne me couche jamais avant onze heures. Le week-end, je me lève tard et je me promène avec mes amis.

(Usually I wake up at half past six, but I get up at about a quarter to seven. First I have a shower and get dressed. Then I have my breakfast: bread, butter and jam. I brush my teeth, then I go to school by bike. Classes start at eight. At midday we eat in the canteen. In the evening I do my homework, rest a little and watch a series. I never go to bed before eleven. At the weekend I get up late and go for a walk with my friends.)

Count what is in there: eight reflexive verbs, two partitives, a negative with jamais, two clock times in the conversational style, a mode of transport with à, a contraction in au lycée, and the nous form of a spelling-change verb. That paragraph is a fair test of the whole course so far.

Reflexives that are not really reflexive

Two groups break the "doing it to yourself" picture, and both are common.

1. Reciprocal: with a plural subject, the pronoun can mean "each other" rather than "themselves". Ils se parlent is they talk to each other, not they talk to themselves. Nous nous écrivons souvent, we write to each other often. Elles se retrouvent au café, they meet each other at the café.
2. Idiomatic: some verbs simply exist in the reflexive form and no self is involved at all. Se dépêcher (to hurry), s'en aller (to leave), se souvenir de (to remember), s'intéresser à (to be interested in), se moquer de (to make fun of), s'appeler (to be called). Nobody calls themselves anything in je m'appelle Marc; that is just how the verb works.

Bottom line: the reflexive pronoun is a grammatical marker first and a meaning second. Learn the verb with its pronoun attached, the way you learned nouns with their article.

Common misconceptions

• "A reflexive verb always means you do it to yourself." Often it does not. Se dépêcher, s'appeler and s'ennuyer involve no self at all in the English sense.
• "You can leave out the pronoun if the meaning is obvious." You cannot. Je lève à sept heures means something like "I lift at seven", and the sentence is broken.
• "Ne goes right in front of the verb." It goes in front of the pronoun: je ne me lève pas, not je me ne lève pas.
• "Je vais se lever is fine because se is the infinitive's own pronoun." No. The pronoun agrees with the subject: je vais me lever, tu vas te lever, nous allons nous lever.
• "Nous nous lavons has a typo." It has two words because it needs two: the subject and the reflexive pronoun happen to be spelled the same.

Pulling it together

A reflexive verb carries a pronoun that matches its subject: me, te, se, nous, vous, se, sitting immediately in front of the verb and eliding before a vowel. Negatives put ne in front of the pronoun and pas after the verb; inversion moves only the subject; and with an infinitive the pronoun moves in front of the infinitive and still matches the subject, which is why it is je vais me lever. Almost every verb in a morning routine is reflexive, body parts take the definite article rather than a possessive, and sequencing words such as d'abord, ensuite, puis and enfin string them into a paragraph. With a plural subject the same pronoun can mean each other, and a handful of verbs are reflexive for no reason you can see. The last two lessons of the course put all of this into the past.

Sources

1. Wikipédia. (2024). Verbe pronominal. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Reflexive verb. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison du verbe se lever. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
4. Le Robert. Dictionnaire de français: entries for verbes pronominaux. Éditions Le Robert. dictionnaire.lerobert.com

Marcel Proust opened his novel in 1913 with seven words: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. For a long time, I went to bed early. The verb is se coucher, which you conjugated in the present last lesson, and here it is in the past. Look at what it is made of. Not one word but three, and the middle one is suis, from être, not ai, from avoir. Which of those two auxiliaries a verb takes is the decision this lesson exists to settle.

The shape of the tense

The passé composé is a compound tense, which is what its name says: composed. Two pieces.

Piece 1	Piece 2	Example	English
avoir or être in the present	the past participle	J'ai mangé.	I ate. / I have eaten.
avoir or être in the present	the past participle	Je suis allé.	I went. / I have gone.

It covers both English past tenses. J'ai mangé is "I ate", "I have eaten" and "I did eat", and French will not distinguish among them. It describes an action that happened and finished, and it is the tense of anything that moves a story forward.

Building the past participle

Verb family	Rule	Infinitive	Participle	Example
-er	drop -er, add é	parler	parlé	J'ai parlé. I spoke.
-ir (regular)	drop -ir, add i	finir	fini	Tu as fini. You finished.
-re	drop -re, add u	vendre	vendu	Il a vendu sa voiture. He sold his car.

Then the irregulars, which are unavoidable because they are the most useful verbs in the language. Learn them as a list; there is no shortcut.

Infinitive	Participle	Infinitive	Participle
avoir	eu (said "u")	mettre (to put)	mis
être	été	écrire (to write)	écrit
faire	fait	dire (to say)	dit
prendre	pris	ouvrir (to open)	ouvert
voir (to see)	vu	pouvoir (to be able)	pu
boire (to drink)	bu	vouloir (to want)	voulu
lire (to read)	lu	devoir (to have to)	dû
venir	venu	savoir (to know)	su

Two of these are worth a moment. Eu, the participle of avoir, is spelled with three letters and pronounced as a single vowel, "u", with the e completely silent. And dû keeps its circumflex to distinguish it from du, the article, exactly as Lesson 1 promised.

Most verbs take avoir

This is the default and covers the large majority of French verbs. The participle does not change for the subject at all.

French	English
J'ai mangé une pomme.	I ate an apple.
Tu as fini tes devoirs.	You finished your homework.
Elle a pris le bus.	She took the bus.
Nous avons vu un film.	We saw a film.
Vous avez fait la cuisine.	You did the cooking.
Ils ont attendu une heure.	They waited an hour.

Negatives and questions wrap around the auxiliary, never around the participle:

• Je n'ai pas mangé. I did not eat.
• Elle n'a jamais vu la mer. She has never seen the sea.
• As-tu fini ? Have you finished?
• Est-ce que vous avez compris ? Did you understand?

Key idea: in a compound tense, the auxiliary is the verb as far as the grammar is concerned. Ne and pas wrap it, inversion moves it, and the participle just sits there.

A short list of verbs that take être

About sixteen verbs, nearly all of them about coming, going or changing state, use être instead. Teachers hand out mnemonics for this list; the honest version is that you memorise it and check yourself for a term.

Verb	English	Participle	Opposite
aller	to go	allé	venir, venu (to come)
arriver	to arrive	arrivé	partir, parti (to leave)
entrer	to enter	entré	sortir, sorti (to go out)
monter	to go up	monté	descendre, descendu (to go down)
naître	to be born	né	mourir, mort (to die)
rester	to stay	resté	tomber, tombé (to fall)
rentrer	to go home	rentré	retourner, retourné (to return)
revenir	to come back	revenu	devenir, devenu (to become)

And here is the part that matters. With être, the past participle agrees with the subject, exactly like an adjective: add e for feminine, s for plural, es for both.

Subject	Sentence	English
masculine singular	Il est allé au marché.	He went to the market.
feminine singular	Elle est allée au marché.	She went to the market.
masculine plural	Ils sont allés au marché.	They went to the market.
feminine plural	Elles sont allées au marché.	They went to the market.

All four are pronounced identically, because the extra e and s are both silent. This is a written distinction only, and it is marked in every French classroom in the world. Marie est arrivée takes the e. If you are a woman writing about yourself, je suis allée takes it too.

Every reflexive verb takes être

Without exception. The pronoun stays in front of the auxiliary, and the participle agrees with the subject.

French	English
Je me suis levé. / Je me suis levée.	I got up. (male speaker / female speaker)
Tu t'es couché tard.	You went to bed late.
Elle s'est habillée.	She got dressed.
Nous nous sommes promenés.	We went for a walk.
Ils se sont dépêchés.	They hurried.
Je ne me suis pas réveillé.	I did not wake up.

Notice the negative in the last row: ne goes in front of the reflexive pronoun and pas goes after the auxiliary, so the bracket contains the pronoun and the auxiliary and leaves the participle outside.

One refinement, stated honestly because it will confuse you if nobody warns you. When a reflexive verb is followed by a direct object, the participle does not agree: Elle s'est lavée (she washed, agreement) but Elle s'est lavé les mains (she washed her hands, no agreement). The rule behind this belongs to a second-year course. For now, note the pattern and do not panic when you see a participle refusing to agree.

The verbs that take both

A few verbs on the être list can also take avoir, and the auxiliary changes the meaning. When they are used without an object they take être and describe movement; when they take a direct object they switch to avoir and mean something more like carrying.

With être	English	With avoir	English
Je suis sorti.	I went out.	J'ai sorti la poubelle.	I took out the bin.
Elle est montée.	She went up.	Elle a monté les valises.	She carried the suitcases up.
Nous sommes descendus.	We went down.	Nous avons descendu l'escalier.	We went down the stairs, treating them as an object.
Il est passé chez moi.	He dropped by my place.	Il a passé un examen.	He sat an exam.

That last row hides a false friend worth keeping: passer un examen means to sit an exam, not to pass it. To pass it is réussir un examen, from Lesson 11.

Telling someone about yesterday

The markers that go with this tense: hier (yesterday), avant-hier (the day before yesterday), hier soir (last night), ce matin (this morning), la semaine dernière, l'année dernière, lundi dernier, il y a deux jours (two days ago), d'abord, ensuite, puis, enfin, soudain (suddenly), tout à coup (all at once).

Now a paragraph that uses both auxiliaries and the reflexives:

Hier, je me suis levé à sept heures. J'ai pris mon petit déjeuner, puis je suis allé au lycée à vélo. Le matin, nous avons eu un contrôle de maths. À midi, j'ai mangé à la cantine avec Léa. Elle est arrivée en retard parce qu'elle a raté le bus. L'après-midi, nous avons fait du sport. Je suis rentré vers six heures, j'ai fait mes devoirs et je me suis couché tôt. Je n'ai pas regardé la télé.

(Yesterday I got up at seven. I had my breakfast, then I went to school by bike. In the morning we had a maths test. At midday I ate in the canteen with Léa. She arrived late because she missed the bus. In the afternoon we did sport. I got home at about six, did my homework and went to bed early. I did not watch television.)

Remember: every verb of going in that paragraph took être and every verb of doing took avoir, and elle est arrivée carries an e that je suis rentré does not, because of who is speaking.

Common misconceptions

• "J'ai mangé means I have eaten, and there is a different tense for I ate." French uses one tense for both. There is a separate literary past, the passé simple, but you meet it only in reading, and no one speaks it.
• "Ne and pas wrap the participle." They wrap the auxiliary: je n'ai pas mangé, never je n'ai mangé pas.
• "Verbs that take être do so because they are important." They form a coherent group: coming, going, arriving, leaving, being born, dying, staying, falling. All of them are about movement or change of state, and all reflexive verbs join them.
• "The agreement on est allée is audible, so I will hear my mistakes." It is not. Every one of allé, allée, allés and allées sounds the same. It is a written rule and it is graded.
• "Passer un examen means to pass an exam." It means to sit one. To pass is réussir.

The takeaway

The passé composé is an auxiliary in the present plus a past participle, and it covers both English past tenses. Participles are built by dropping the infinitive ending and adding é for -er verbs, i for regular -ir verbs and u for -re verbs, with a list of irregulars, eu, été, fait, pris, vu, bu, lu, écrit, dit, mis, ouvert, venu, pu, voulu, dû and su, that has to be learned. Most verbs take avoir and the participle does not change. About sixteen verbs of movement and change of state take être, along with every reflexive verb, and with être the participle agrees with the subject in gender and number, silently but visibly. Ne and pas wrap the auxiliary, and inversion moves the auxiliary. A handful of verbs take either auxiliary, with a change of meaning. The last lesson of the course adds the other past tense, and the question of when to use which.

Sources

1. Wikipédia. (2024). Passé composé. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Passé composé. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipédia. (2024). Accord du participe passé en français. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
4. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison et participes passés. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
5. Proust, M. (1913). Du côté de chez Swann. Paris: Bernard Grasset.

Two sentences about the same afternoon. Il pleuvait. It was raining. Il a plu. It rained. Both are past, both are correct French, and they say completely different things about the shape of the rain. The first is a backdrop with no edges: the rain was going on, and something else is about to happen inside it. The second is a closed event: the rain happened and then it was over. French makes you choose, every single time you talk about the past, and this lesson is about how.

Building the imparfait, which is almost too easy

Take the nous form of the present tense. Chop off the -ons. Add these endings.

Pronoun	Ending	parler	English
je	-ais	je parlais	I was speaking, I used to speak
tu	-ais	tu parlais	you were speaking
il, elle, on	-ait	il parlait	he was speaking
nous	-ions	nous parlions	we were speaking
vous	-iez	vous parliez	you were speaking
ils, elles	-aient	ils parlaient	they were speaking

The stem rule handles the irregular verbs for free, which is the point of it.

Infinitive	nous form	Stem	Imparfait
finir	nous finissons	finiss-	je finissais
vendre	nous vendons	vend-	je vendais
faire	nous faisons	fais-	je faisais
prendre	nous prenons	pren-	je prenais
aller	nous allons	all-	j'allais
avoir	nous avons	av-	j'avais
boire	nous buvons	buv-	je buvais

Even aller, the suppletive monster of Lesson 14, is perfectly regular here, because its nous form is tame. There is exactly one exception in the whole tense: être, whose stem is ét-, giving j'étais, tu étais, il était, nous étions, vous étiez, ils étaient. One irregular verb in an entire tense is as generous as French ever gets.

What matters here: if you can produce the nous form of the present, you can produce the imparfait of any verb in the language except one.

Two spelling notes, both familiar. Manger keeps its e before a: je mangeais, il mangeait, ils mangeaient, but nous mangions, vous mangiez, where the i already softens the g. Commencer does the same with its cédille: je commençais but nous commencions. And to the ear, -ais, -ait and -aient are all identical, so once again four written forms share one sound and only nous and vous stand out.

What the imparfait is for

1. Description and background. Il faisait beau et il y avait beaucoup de monde. The weather was fine and there were a lot of people. Setting the scene is the imparfait's home territory.
2. Habit and repetition. Quand j'étais petit, j'allais à la mer tous les étés. When I was small, I used to go to the sea every summer. English marks this with "used to" or "would"; French marks it with the tense itself.
3. An action in progress, usually about to be interrupted. Je regardais la télé quand le téléphone a sonné. I was watching television when the phone rang.
4. States: age, time, weather, feelings, opinions, physical condition. J'avais dix ans. I was ten. Il était trois heures du matin. It was three in the morning. Elle voulait partir. She wanted to leave. Nous étions fatigués. We were tired.

The two tenses side by side

	Imparfait	Passé composé
What it shows	A situation with no clear edges	An event with a beginning and an end
Its job in a story	Background, scenery, conditions	The things that happen, in order
Repetition	Habit: I used to, I would	Counted events: once, twice, three times
Typical markers	toujours, souvent, tous les jours, le samedi, d'habitude, chaque année, pendant que, quand j'étais petit	hier, soudain, tout à coup, un jour, une fois, deux fois, puis, ensuite, enfin
Example	Je jouais au foot le mercredi.	Mercredi dernier, j'ai joué au foot.
English	I used to play football on Wednesdays.	Last Wednesday I played football.

The comparison that unlocks it for most people is a photograph against a film clip. The imparfait is the still: the room, the weather, how everyone felt, what was normally the case. The passé composé is the clip: the door opened, she came in, the glass fell. A story needs both, and the two tenses interlock rather than compete.

The pattern you will use constantly

Scene in the imparfait, event in the passé composé, joined by quand (when) or pendant que (while).

Background (imparfait)	Event (passé composé)	English
Je dormais	quand tu as téléphoné.	I was asleep when you rang.
Nous mangions	quand ils sont arrivés.	We were eating when they arrived.
Il faisait froid, alors	j'ai mis mon manteau.	It was cold, so I put on my coat.
Elle avait faim, donc	elle a pris un sandwich.	She was hungry, so she had a sandwich.

Now a paragraph that shows the two tenses doing their separate jobs:

Quand j'étais au collège, j'habitais dans un petit village. Tous les matins, je prenais le bus à sept heures et demie et j'arrivais en classe vers huit heures. Il y avait vingt-cinq élèves dans ma classe et le professeur d'histoire s'appelait Monsieur Rivière. Un jour, en hiver, il a neigé toute la nuit. Le bus n'est pas venu. Nous avons attendu une heure, puis nous sommes rentrés à pied. Ce jour-là, personne n'est allé au collège.

(When I was at secondary school, I lived in a small village. Every morning I took the bus at half past seven and arrived in class at about eight. There were twenty-five students in my class and the history teacher was called Monsieur Rivière. One day, in winter, it snowed all night. The bus did not come. We waited an hour, then we walked home. That day, nobody went to school.)

Read it again and watch the tense switch at Un jour. Everything before that is how things were: the village, the bus, the class size, the teacher's name. Everything after is what happened on one particular occasion. The switch is the story starting.

Debug: the sentence that is nearly right

A learner wants to say "Yesterday I went to the cinema" and writes Hier, j'allais au cinéma. That is a real French sentence, but it does not mean what they intended. It means something like "Yesterday I was on my way to the cinema", and a French reader will wait for the rest: and then what? The clue is the marker. Hier points to one bounded occasion, so the tense has to be the passé composé: Hier, je suis allé au cinéma.

Run the test the other way. "When I was ten I went to the cinema every Saturday" cannot be a passé composé, because nothing here is bounded: it is a habit stretching across years. Quand j'avais dix ans, j'allais au cinéma tous les samedis. Two identical English verbs, two different French tenses, and the marker in the sentence tells you which.

In short: before choosing a past tense, look for the time marker. Hier, un jour and soudain point to the passé composé; tous les jours, souvent and quand j'étais point to the imparfait.

A few verbs that change meaning with the tense

With verbs describing knowledge, ability and wanting, the imparfait gives the state and the passé composé gives the moment it changed. This is subtle, and you are not expected to control it yet, but it explains sentences that otherwise look wrong.

Imparfait	English	Passé composé	English
je savais	I knew	j'ai su	I found out
je pouvais	I was able to, I could	j'ai pu	I managed to
je voulais	I wanted to	j'ai voulu	I decided to, I tried to
je connaissais	I knew, I was familiar with	j'ai connu	I met, I got to know
il y avait	there was, there used to be	il y a eu	there was, on one occasion

The upshot: the imparfait describes how things stood; the passé composé reports the moment they changed. Even here the underlying logic is the same one.

Common misconceptions

• "The imparfait is the past of description and the passé composé is the past of speech." Both are spoken constantly. The difference is aspect, meaning the shape of the action, not register.
• "Imparfait always translates as was doing." It also translates as "used to", as "would" in the habitual sense, and often as a plain English past: j'avais dix ans is "I was ten", not "I was being ten".
• "The imparfait has lots of irregular verbs." It has exactly one, être. Every other verb builds it from the nous stem of the present, aller and prendre and faire included.
• "You can hear the difference between je parlais and ils parlaient." You cannot. The endings -ais, -ait and -aient are identical in sound; only the nous and vous forms are audibly different.
• "Choosing the wrong past tense is a small error." It changes the meaning. Hier, j'allais au cinéma and Hier, je suis allé au cinéma describe different events.

Putting it together: where this leaves you

The imparfait is built by taking the nous form of the present, removing -ons and adding -ais, -ais, -ait, -ions, -iez, -aient, and only être escapes the rule. It carries description, background, habit, ongoing action and states such as age, time, weather and feeling. The passé composé carries bounded events, and a story alternates between the two: scenery in the imparfait, action in the passé composé, usually stitched together with quand or pendant que. Time markers are your best guide, and when a verb of knowing, wanting or being able switches tense, it is switching between a state and the moment that state changed.

That is the end of French I. You can now pronounce written French, greet people and pitch your register, describe people and things with agreement, use four kinds of article, conjugate the three regular families plus être, avoir, aller, faire and the reflexives, ask and deny, count and tell the time, and narrate in two past tenses. What you cannot do from this page is hear or be heard, and that half is not optional: take these lessons to a class, a conversation partner, or the free graded audio at TV5MONDE and RFI, and let your ear catch up with your grammar.

Sources

1. Wikipédia. (2024). Imparfait. Wikipédia. fr.wikipedia.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Imperfect. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Le Conjugueur. Conjugaison: l'imparfait de l'indicatif. Le Figaro. leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr
4. TV5MONDE. Apprendre le français: les temps du passé. TV5MONDE. apprendre.tv5monde.com
5. Radio France Internationale. Français facile: journal en français facile with transcripts. RFI. francaisfacile.rfi.fr