French II

At 7:14 on a Tuesday morning at the Gare de la Part-Dieu in Lyon, a train did not leave. Here is a French speaker telling you about it. Read the two versions before you read anything else.

Version A. Il a fait froid. Il y a eu beaucoup de monde sur le quai. J'ai attendu. Le train n'est pas parti. J'ai été en retard.

(It was cold. There were a lot of people on the platform. I waited. The train did not leave. I was late.)

Version B. Il faisait froid et il y avait beaucoup de monde sur le quai. J'attendais depuis vingt minutes quand une voix a annoncé que le train ne partirait pas. Je suis arrivé au lycée à neuf heures et quart.

(It was cold and there were a lot of people on the platform. I had been waiting for twenty minutes when a voice announced that the train would not be leaving. I got to school at a quarter past nine.)

Both versions are grammatical. Only the second one is a story. Version A is a list of five closed boxes with nothing between them, and a French reader will feel the jolt of it: cold, closed; crowd, closed; waiting, closed. Version B has a room you can stand in, and then something happens inside that room. That difference is what this lesson trains, because you already know how to build both tenses and the remaining work is entirely about choosing.

The machinery, refitted in sixty seconds

You built both tenses in French I. Here they are side by side, once, so that nothing in this lesson depends on remembering.

The word grammarians use for the thing you are choosing is aspect: not when an action happened, but what shape it had. Both of these tenses are past. Neither is more past than the other. Il faisait froid and il a fait froid describe the same Tuesday.

Key idea: the two tenses do not compete for the same job. One draws the room, the other moves things across it, and a story that is missing either one reads as broken French.

Sorting a story before you write a word of it

Here is a method that works on paper. Take the thing you want to tell, in English, and put every verb into one of two columns.

Column 1 becomes the imparfait. Column 2 becomes the passé composé. The test for which column a verb belongs in is not English grammar, which will mislead you, but a question: could this have gone on for another hour without anybody noticing? Cold can. A crowd can. Waiting can. A door closing cannot: it takes a second and then it is over. An announcement cannot. Arriving cannot.

Now watch the test decide a sentence English leaves ambiguous. "I read for two hours." Could it have gone on? Yes, but the sentence has closed it off with a measured stretch of time: two hours, start to finish, a box. So: J'ai lu pendant deux heures. I read for two hours. But "I was reading when you called" leaves the reading open, so: Je lisais quand tu as appelé. Same verb, same afternoon, two different shapes.

One caution about the test. A state can be reported as an event if the speaker is closing it off deliberately: J'ai eu peur. I got frightened, at that moment. J'avais peur. I was frightened, throughout. French is not telling you what fear is really like; it is telling you how this speaker is packaging it.

The joins: quand, pendant que, alors que, comme

Most of the time the two tenses meet inside one sentence, stitched by a conjunction. The conjunction does not choose the tense for you, but it does tell you what kind of join is coming.

Look at the last row. Two events, no background, two passé composés. The pattern "imparfait plus quand plus passé composé" is common enough that learners start applying it everywhere, and dès que is the reminder that the conjunction is not the rule. The shape of the action is the rule.

A whole story, with the seams showing

This is the incident at Part-Dieu written out properly. Read the French first, then the English, then the commentary.

C'était un mardi de janvier. Il faisait moins deux degrés et le quai B était plein de lycéens qui attendaient le 7 h 14 pour Grenoble. Moi, j'avais mon sac sur le dos et je révisais mon contrôle de maths. D'habitude, ce train partait à l'heure. Ce matin-là, il n'est pas parti. À 7 h 20, une voix a annoncé un problème technique. Les gens ont soupiré. Une femme à côté de moi a téléphoné à son bureau. Moi, je n'ai rien fait, parce que je ne savais pas quoi faire. Puis j'ai vu le bus 37 devant la gare et j'ai couru. Je suis arrivé au lycée à neuf heures et quart, et le contrôle de maths avait déjà commencé.

(It was a Tuesday in January. It was minus two degrees and platform B was full of school students waiting for the 7:14 to Grenoble. I had my bag on my back and I was revising for my maths test. Normally that train left on time. That morning, it did not leave. At 7:20, a voice announced a technical problem. People sighed. A woman next to me rang her office. Me, I did nothing, because I did not know what to do. Then I saw the number 37 bus in front of the station and I ran. I got to school at a quarter past nine, and the maths test had already started.)

Five things are worth pointing at.

1. C'était, il faisait, le quai était plein, j'avais, je révisais. Five verbs before anything happens at all. That is not padding; it is the room being built.
2. D'habitude, ce train partait à l'heure. Habit, so imparfait, and the marker d'habitude tells you before the verb does.
3. Ce matin-là, il n'est pas parti. Ce matin-là means that particular morning, which closes the box. A negative event is still an event: not leaving happened once, at 7:14, and it is a passé composé.
4. Je ne savais pas quoi faire. A state of mind running through the scene, so imparfait, even though it sits among events.
5. Le contrôle avait déjà commencé. That is neither of our two tenses. It is the plus-que-parfait, which reaches back behind the story, and it is the whole of the next lesson.

The point: in a well-told French past, the imparfait verbs usually outnumber the passé composé verbs at the start and then thin out as the action takes over. If your paragraph has twelve passé composés in a row, you have written Version A.

The verbs that change meaning when they change tense

A small group of very common verbs means one thing as a state and another as an event. French I mentioned this; here is the full working set, because at A2 you will meet all of them.

Two sentences that sound almost identical in English, and are not:

Je devais rentrer à six heures, mais je suis resté. I was supposed to be home at six, but I stayed. J'ai dû rentrer à six heures. I had to be home at six, and I was.

The imparfait leaves the obligation hanging; the passé composé says it landed. Notice that neither French sentence contains a word for "but I did not". The tense carries it.

Debug: three sentences that are nearly right

Hier, je prenais le bus et je suis arrivé en retard. Hier fixes one bounded morning, so the bus-taking is an event inside it: Hier, j'ai pris le bus et je suis arrivé en retard.

Quand j'étais petite, j'ai joué du piano. The frame quand j'étais petite stretches over years, so playing the piano inside it is a habit: Quand j'étais petite, je jouais du piano. The version with the passé composé is not wrong French, but it means she played the piano once, as a child, on some occasion, which is presumably not what she meant.

Il a plu pendant que je marchais, donc j'étais trempé. The first half is fine. The second half packages a result, which is an event: donc j'ai été trempé if you mean I got soaked, or keep j'étais trempé if you mean I was soaking wet for the rest of the afternoon. Both exist; they say different things.

What matters here: when you cannot decide, do not look at the English verb form. Ask whether the action has edges in the world you are describing.

Common misconceptions

• "The imparfait is further back in time than the passé composé." It is not. Both reach the same distance. The plus-que-parfait is the one that reaches further, and you meet it next.
• "English was doing always means imparfait." Usually, but not with a measured stretch: "I was working there for three years and then I left" is J'ai travaillé là pendant trois ans, puis je suis parti, because pendant trois ans closes the box.
• "quand always takes the imparfait on one side." Dès que je suis entré, tout le monde s'est tu has two events and two passé composés. The conjunction does not decide.
• "A negative sentence is background because nothing happened." Il n'est pas parti is an event: the non-departure occurred at 7:14 and was over.
• "Description is a literary thing you can skip in speech." Spoken French is full of the imparfait. Il y avait, c'était, je voulais and je savais are among the commonest verb forms you will hear all day.

What to carry forward

Sort before you write. Every verb in a past story belongs either to how things stood, which is the imparfait, or to what happened, which is the passé composé, and the question that sorts them is whether the action could have carried on unnoticed for another hour. Markers help: d'habitude, souvent, tous les jours, quand j'étais and pendant que lean one way; hier, ce matin-là, soudain, tout à coup, à 7 h 20 and dès que lean the other. Conjunctions join the two but do not decide them. A handful of verbs, savoir, connaître, pouvoir, vouloir, devoir and avoir, name a state in the imparfait and the moment that state broke in the passé composé. And a paragraph made only of passé composés is not a French story; it is a list.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Narration: passé composé vs. imparfait. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Imparfait: states of being, habitual actions. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Imparfait: usages et emplois. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Passé composé: généralités. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca

Here is a sentence with a hole in it. Quand je suis arrivée à la gare, le train est parti. Translate it and you get "When I got to the station, the train left", which sounds like the train waited for you and then pulled out. That is not what the speaker meant. She meant the train had already gone. French has a tense whose entire job is to say so, and without it the sentence is not ambiguous so much as wrong: Quand je suis arrivée à la gare, le train était déjà parti. When I got to the station, the train had already left.

English does this too, with "had". The difference is that English tolerates dropping it in casual speech and French does not. If event A happened before event B, and you are telling B first, French makes you mark A.

How it is built, which takes one line

The plus-que-parfait is the passé composé with its auxiliary moved into the imparfait. That is the whole rule.

Everything you already know carries over untouched. The same verbs take être. The same participles are irregular. The agreement rules are identical, so elle était partie has its e and elles étaient parties has its es. Negation wraps the auxiliary: je n'avais pas compris, I had not understood. There is nothing new to memorise, which is why this tense is worth learning early: it costs almost nothing and it repairs a whole class of broken sentences.

In short: imparfait of avoir or être, plus the participle you already use. No new participles, no new auxiliary rules, no new agreement.

Three layers, and why order on the page is not order in time

Think of three shelves. The bottom shelf is the plus-que-parfait: things already over before the story starts. The middle shelf is the passé composé and the imparfait: the story itself. The top shelf is the present, where you are standing as you tell it.

Notice the trap in row two. Je n'avais pas de parapluie looks like a plus-que-parfait because of avais, but it is the plain imparfait of avoir followed by a noun. The plus-que-parfait always has a participle after the auxiliary: je n'avais pas pris de parapluie, I had not taken an umbrella. One word tells them apart.

The four places where French insists on it

1. An earlier event, told later. Elle a réussi son examen parce qu'elle avait beaucoup travaillé. She passed her exam because she had worked hard. The working came first, but the sentence reports it second, so it drops a shelf.
2. With déjà and pas encore. Quand nous sommes entrés, le film avait déjà commencé. When we came in, the film had already started. À midi, il ne s'était pas encore levé. At noon, he had still not got up.
3. Regret and reproach with si. Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu. If I had known, I would not have come. The short form Si j'avais su! is a complete utterance in spoken French and means roughly "If only I had known."
4. Reported speech about the past. Direct: Il a dit: "J'ai perdu mes clés." He said, "I have lost my keys." Reported: Il a dit qu'il avait perdu ses clés. He said he had lost his keys. When the reporting verb is in the past, a passé composé inside the quotation drops to the plus-que-parfait. The technical name for this machinery is the concordance des temps.

Worth holding on to: the trigger is not a word but a relationship. Two past moments, one earlier than the other, and the earlier one is not the one you are narrating: that is when the tense is required.

venir de, which does the opposite job

There is a neat construction that sits right beside this tense and is often confused with it. Venir de plus an infinitive means to have just done something. In the present it points at the very recent past: Je viens de finir. I have just finished. Put venir into the imparfait and it points at the very recent past of a past moment: Je venais de finir quand tu as appelé. I had just finished when you rang.

So je venais de rentrer quand l'orage a éclaté and j'étais rentré quand l'orage a éclaté both put the homecoming first. Only the first one says it was a near miss.

A paragraph using all three past tenses

Marion est arrivée au cinéma à vingt heures dix. Elle avait acheté son billet sur Internet le matin, mais elle avait oublié de le télécharger. Il y avait une longue queue devant la caisse et le film avait déjà commencé. Elle a expliqué le problème à l'employé, qui lui a demandé son nom. Heureusement, il venait de recevoir la liste des réservations. Il a imprimé le billet et Marion est entrée dans la salle pendant la deuxième scène.

(Marion got to the cinema at ten past eight. She had bought her ticket online that morning, but she had forgotten to download it. There was a long queue at the desk and the film had already started. She explained the problem to the member of staff, who asked her name. Luckily, he had just received the list of bookings. He printed the ticket and Marion went into the screen during the second scene.)

Count the shelves. Arriving, explaining, asking, printing and entering are the story, in the passé composé. The queue and its length are the room, in the imparfait. Buying the ticket, forgetting to download it, the film starting and the list arriving all happened before Marion reached the desk, and every one of them is on the bottom shelf. Remove the plus-que-parfait from this paragraph and the reader can no longer tell what happened in what order.

Common misconceptions

• "It is just a more literary past." It is not a register choice. It marks order. Spoken French uses it constantly, and si j'avais su is about as colloquial as a sentence gets.
• "Any avais or étais makes a plus-que-parfait." Only with a participle after it. J'avais faim is an imparfait; j'avais mangé is a plus-que-parfait.
• "Agreement does not apply because the auxiliary is in the imparfait." It applies exactly as before: elles étaient déjà sorties, with the e and the s.
• "You need it whenever something happened earlier." Only when the earlier thing is out of narrative order. A story told in sequence, j'ai ouvert la porte, je suis entré, j'ai allumé, needs nothing but the passé composé.
• "venais de and étais parti are interchangeable." Both put the action earlier; only venir de claims it was moments earlier.

The short version

The plus-que-parfait is the imparfait of avoir or être plus the past participle you already know, with the same auxiliary choice, the same irregular participles and the same agreement. It marks the event that came first when the telling puts it second, and French requires it where English can shrug and leave it out. Four settings make it compulsory in practice: a cause reported after its effect, the pairing with déjà or pas encore, the regret formula si j'avais su, and reported speech after a past reporting verb. Beside it, venir de in the imparfait gives you had just, for the near miss. And one test separates it from a plain imparfait every time: look for a participle after the auxiliary.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Plus-que-parfait. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Wikipédia. (2024). Plus-que-parfait. Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. fr.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Pluperfect. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Grevisse, M., and Goosse, A. (2016). Le bon usage (16th ed.), sections on the plus-que-parfait and the concordance des temps. De Boeck Supérieur. Print reference work, consulted for the rule on reported speech; no free online edition exists.

Two sentences from the same waiting room in Bordeaux, both said by the same woman, five seconds apart. Je me suis coupée. I cut myself. Je me suis coupé le doigt. I cut my finger. The first participle has an e on the end. The second does not. Nothing about her changed, nothing about the cut changed, and the verb is the same verb. The rule that produces that difference is the subject of this lesson, and it is one of the two or three places where written French asks something that spoken French does not, because coupée and coupé sound exactly alike.

Step one: the auxiliary is always être

A verbe pronominal is a verb carrying a pronoun that points back at its own subject: se laver, se lever, se coucher, s'habiller, se dépêcher. In the passé composé, every single one of them takes être, with no exceptions and no list to learn. The reflexive pronoun goes in front of the auxiliary.

Notice nous nous sommes and vous vous êtes. The doubling looks like a typing error and is not: the first pronoun is the subject, the second is the reflexive. Learners drop one of them constantly, so read those two rows again.

Negation wraps the auxiliary, with the reflexive pronoun tucked inside the ne: je ne me suis pas reposé, I did not rest. Elle ne s'est pas levée avant midi. She did not get up before noon. Inversion questions put the subject after the auxiliary: Vous êtes-vous reposé? Did you rest? In everyday speech you would far more likely say Vous vous êtes reposé? with a rising tone, or Est-ce que vous vous êtes reposé?

Step two: the agreement, worked through once

Take Camille s'est lavée. Camille washed. Ask the only question that matters: what did she wash? The answer is herself, and "herself" is the pronoun se. So se is the direct object, it sits before the verb, and a preceding direct object makes the participle agree. Camille is feminine and singular, so the participle gains an e: lavée.

Now change one thing. Camille s'est lavé les mains. Camille washed her hands. What did she wash? Not herself: her hands. Les mains is now the direct object, and it comes after the verb, not before it. The pronoun se has been demoted to something like "to herself", which is indirect. No preceding direct object, so no agreement: lavé, bare.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth stating as a procedure you can run on any sentence.

1. Find the verb and ask "did what? washed what? cut what?"
2. If the answer is the reflexive pronoun itself, the participle agrees with the subject.
3. If the answer is a noun sitting after the verb, the participle does not move.
4. If the verb never had a direct object to begin with, because it takes à, the pronoun is indirect and the participle does not move either.

The verbs that block agreement because they govern à are a short, high-frequency list worth memorising as a block: se parler, se téléphoner, s'écrire, se dire, se demander, se répondre, se plaire, se ressembler, se sourire, se mentir, s'acheter (in the sense of buying for oneself). All of them keep the bare participle: elles se sont téléphoné, ils se sont dit bonjour, elle s'est acheté une veste.

The core of it: the participle agrees with what comes before it, not with who is speaking. Put a noun after the verb and the agreement disappears.

The body, and how French says it hurts

French reports pain with avoir mal à, and the à contracts with the article exactly as it always does: à plus le gives au, à plus les gives aux.

Every sentence in the right-hand column with a body part after the verb has a bare participle: foulé, cassé, fait. That is the exception doing its work in the most common setting you will ever meet it. Other useful states: J'ai de la fièvre (I have a temperature), Je tousse (I have a cough), J'ai un rhume (I have a cold), Je suis fatigué (I am tired), Je me sens mal (I feel ill), Ça me démange (it itches).

Chez le médecin: a scripted appointment, in vous

Everything in this dialogue is vous, because a patient and a doctor who have not met use vous in France whatever their ages. The register marker to watch is the conditional in the doctor's questions, which softens them; you will build that tense yourself in Lesson 9.

The green plastic carte Vitale is the French health insurance card: the doctor reads it and the reimbursement is handled electronically. Two more words you will need in the same building: une ordonnance is a prescription, not a written order in the legal sense, and la pharmacie, marked by a green cross, is where you take it.

Why this matters: almost every sentence a patient says about an injury is a pronominal verb in the passé composé with a body part after it, which is precisely the pattern that takes no agreement. Learn the medical vocabulary and you have drilled the exception by accident.

Common misconceptions

• "Some reflexive verbs take avoir." None do. Every pronominal verb in a compound tense uses être.
• "The participle agrees with the subject." It agrees with a preceding direct object, which is usually the reflexive pronoun and therefore usually matches the subject. When it is not, as in elle s'est lavé les mains, the subject is irrelevant.
• "You can hear the agreement." Not with -er verbs: lavé, lavée, lavés and lavées are one sound. You hear it only where the participle ends in a consonant, as in elle s'est assise, where the s is pronounced.
• "Elles se sont téléphonées is right because both are women." Téléphoner takes à, so the pronoun is indirect and the participle stays bare: elles se sont téléphoné.
• "Use mon, ma, mes with body parts, as in English." French prefers the definite article with the reflexive: je me suis lavé les mains, not mes mains, because the pronoun already says whose they are.

Putting it together

Pronominal verbs form the passé composé with être, the reflexive pronoun standing in front of the auxiliary, ne and pas wrapping the auxiliary from outside it. The past participle agrees with the reflexive pronoun when that pronoun is the direct object, which is the ordinary case: elle s'est levée, ils se sont rencontrés. It stays bare in two situations: when a direct object follows the verb, which is what happens with every body part, and when the verb governs à, which covers se parler, se téléphoner, s'écrire, se dire and se demander. French describes pain with avoir mal à plus the article, and describes injury with a pronominal verb plus the body part, so je me suis cassé le bras carries no e whoever is speaking. At the doctor you use vous, you say what happened and where it hurts, and you leave with une ordonnance for la pharmacie.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Passé composé of pronominal verbs: formation, agreement and exceptions. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Accord du participe passé des verbes essentiellement pronominaux. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Accord du participe passé des verbes occasionnellement pronominaux. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipédia. (2024). Carte Vitale. Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre. fr.wikipedia.org

A real learner wrote this sentence in a homework exercise: Je l'ai acheté le pull. She meant "I bought the jumper". Two things have gone wrong, and tracing them is faster than any rule I could state first.

The first error is doubling. A pronoun replaces a noun; it does not accompany one. If you keep le pull, you do not get l'. If you use l', the noun goes. The second error is hiding behind the first: had she written Je l'ai acheté meaning the jumper, she would have been right, but if the thing bought were la veste, the jacket, the sentence would have to be Je l'ai achetée, with an e you cannot hear. So this one short sentence contains the position rule, the replacement rule and the agreement rule at once, which is why we are starting from it.

What counts as a direct object

A direct object is what the verb lands on with no preposition in between. Test it by asking the verb "whom?" or "what?" and seeing whether the answer arrives bare.

Four French verbs trip up English speakers here because English inserts a preposition where French does not: attendre (to wait for), chercher (to look for), écouter (to listen to) and regarder (to look at). All four take a direct object. Je l'attends means I am waiting for him, and there is no word for "for" anywhere in it.

The seven forms, and where they stand

Le, la, me and te elide before a vowel or a mute h: je l'aime, il m'attend, elle t'invite. Nous, vous and les never elide, but les triggers a liaison you should hear in your head: je les aime is pronounced with a z between them.

The position rule for a single verb is simple and absolute: the pronoun goes immediately before the verb it belongs to, which puts it before the subject's verb and after the subject. Not at the end, where English puts it.

Look at row three. In a negative, ne comes first, then the pronoun, then the verb, then pas: ne le les pas is the shape, or rather ne + pronoun + verb + pas. Learners often write Je ne prends pas le, which is impossible: the pronoun can never be stranded at the end.

Remember: the pronoun leans on its verb. Find the verb the object belongs to and put the pronoun directly in front of it.

Two verbs, and the question of which one it leans on

When a conjugated verb is followed by an infinitive, the object almost always belongs to the infinitive, so the pronoun goes in front of the infinitive, not in front of the conjugated verb.

The reason is the same one as before: acheter is the verb that has the object, not aller. You are not going the jumper; you are buying it. Test by asking which verb the noun answered.

In the passé composé, and the agreement nobody hears

In a compound tense the pronoun goes before the auxiliary, because the auxiliary is the conjugated verb. And then the rule that governs every French past participle with avoir applies: a direct object placed before the verb makes the participle agree.

The last row is a preview of the next lesson, but it makes the point cleanly: only direct objects trigger agreement. With -er verbs none of this is audible, which is why French schoolchildren spend years on it. It becomes audible with participles ending in a consonant: La lettre? Je l'ai écrite. The written te is pronounced, so écrite and écrit sound different. Same with mise against mis, prise against pris, faite against fait.

The upshot: in the passé composé the pronoun jumps in front of the auxiliary and drags an agreement onto the participle behind it.

The other le, which stands for a whole idea

French has a second le that replaces not a noun but an entire clause, and it has no gender because there is nothing to agree with. English usually leaves it out.

Elle est déjà partie? Oui, je le sais. Has she already left? Yes, I know. Tu viens demain? Je ne le pense pas. Are you coming tomorrow? I do not think so. Il a réussi, et il le mérite. He passed, and he deserves it. If you try to say je sais on its own in answer to a question, a French speaker will wait for the rest of the sentence.

Clothes, sizes and prices, because that is where you will use this

Two vocabulary traps. Un pantalon and un jean are singular in French, so you say ce pantalon est trop grand, this pair of trousers is too big. And continental sizing uses different numbers from British or American sizing: a woman's taille 38 is roughly a UK 10, and a pointure 39 is roughly a UK 6. Ask Vous faites quelle taille? What size are you? and answer Je fais du 38. I am a 38.

Prices use a comma where English uses a point, and the euro sign follows the number: 39,90 €. You say it trente-neuf euros quatre-vingt-dix, or in shop shorthand trente-neuf quatre-vingt-dix. Ça coûte combien? How much is it? Ça fait combien? How much does that come to? C'est en solde? Is it in the sale? Je peux payer par carte? Can I pay by card?

The shop, in vous

Count the pronouns: the noun pull is spoken once and then replaced nine times. That is the normal density of real French, and it is why a learner who cannot place these pronouns cannot follow a conversation even when every word is known.

Common misconceptions

• "The pronoun goes after the verb, as in English." Never, except in the affirmative imperative, which is Lesson 7. I see him is je le vois, in that order.
• "Le always means him and la always means her." They also mean it, for masculine and feminine objects. Je la prends can mean I will take the jacket.
• "You can keep the noun and add the pronoun for emphasis." Not like this. Je l'ai acheté le pull is wrong. French does have an emphatic construction, Le pull, je l'ai acheté, with a comma and a pause, but the noun is then outside the clause.
• "Attendre needs a word for for." It does not: j'attends le bus, je l'attends. The same goes for chercher, écouter and regarder.
• "Agreement with avoir is optional." In writing it is not. The rule is that a direct object standing before the verb makes the participle agree, and examiners in France test it constantly.

What to remember

A direct object answers the verb's whom or what with no preposition attached, which in French includes attendre, chercher, écouter and regarder. Replace it with me, te, le, la, nous, vous or les, and put that pronoun immediately in front of the verb it belongs to: before the single conjugated verb, before the infinitive when there are two verbs, and before the auxiliary in the passé composé. Negation wraps the whole unit, ne before the pronoun and pas after the verb. In a compound tense the participle then agrees with the pronoun, silently for -er verbs and audibly for participles such as écrite, prise and faite. A separate neuter le replaces a whole idea, as in je le sais. And in a clothes shop all of this arrives at once, with taille for clothes, pointure for shoes, and a price written 39,90 € and said trente-neuf euros quatre-vingt-dix.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Direct object pronouns. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Synthèse des règles d'accord du participe passé employé avec avoir. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Clothing sizes: European sizing systems. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Introduction to pronouns. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu

A chalkboard outside a bistro in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris reads: Formule midi 16,50 € - entrée + plat ou plat + dessert. Plat du jour: blanquette de veau. Lunch deal 16.50 euros, starter plus main or main plus dessert. Dish of the day: veal in white sauce. A waiter comes over, looks at the two of you, and says to your friend: Je vous apporte la carte, et je lui apporte de l'eau. I will bring you the menu, and I will bring him water.

Two pronouns, one sentence, and neither of them is le, la or les. They are the other set, and the only thing you need in order to choose between the two sets is the ability to spot a preposition.

The two sets, side by side

This is the comparison the whole lesson is built on. Read across the rows, not down the columns.

Four of the six forms are the same in both sets, which is good news: il me voit and il me parle both use me. The whole distinction lives in the third person, where direct gives le and la and les, and indirect gives lui and leur.

Two things about lui that surprise everyone. First, lui covers both genders: je lui ai téléphoné is I phoned him or I phoned her, and only the context tells you which. If you must be explicit, French says je lui ai téléphoné, à elle. Second, lui as a direct object does not exist; the word lui also turns up as a stressed pronoun after prepositions, which is a different thing you will meet in a moment.

And note the last row, which is the practical payoff of the whole distinction: indirect objects never make a participle agree. Les filles? Je les ai vues with a double agreement, but Les filles? Je leur ai parlé with none at all.

Which verbs take à, and which only look as though they should

You cannot deduce this from English. The safest method is to learn the verb together with its preposition, the way you learn a noun together with its gender.

Plaire deserves a second look because it reverses the English. French does not say "he likes the film"; it says the film pleases him. Ce plat me plaît. I like this dish. Les desserts lui plaisent. She likes the desserts, with the verb agreeing with les desserts, the subject.

Now the counter-list, which is where learners lose marks. A small group of verbs takes à, but the person after it cannot become lui or leur. Instead you keep à and follow it with a stressed pronoun: moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux, elles.

There is no elegant reason for this split; it is a fact about a handful of high-frequency verbs, and the list above is short enough to memorise. Bottom line: most verbs with à take lui or leur before the verb, but penser à, faire attention à, s'intéresser à, s'habituer à and tenir à keep à plus a stressed pronoun after the verb.

Position, which you already know

Everything from the previous lesson transfers without change. Before the single verb: Je leur écris. I write to them. Before the infinitive: Je vais leur écrire. I am going to write to them. Before the auxiliary: Je leur ai écrit. I wrote to them. Around it all in the negative: Je ne leur ai pas écrit. I did not write to them.

The one difference is the silence where the agreement used to be. Compare: Les lettres? Je les ai écrites and À mes cousins? Je leur ai écrit. Direct object in front, participle agrees; indirect object in front, nothing happens.

The restaurant, from the door to the bill

French restaurants distinguish la carte, the full list of dishes, from le menu or la formule, a fixed-price set meal. Ordering à la carte means choosing freely from the list and paying per dish; this is where the English phrase comes from, and it is a prix fixe arrangement in reverse.

Two practical facts. A carafe d'eau, a jug of tap water, is provided free on request in French restaurants, so you never have to buy bottled water. And service compris means the service charge is already in the price, so a tip is optional and small; leaving a couple of euros for good service is normal, leaving fifteen percent is not.

What matters here: the waiter's questions are full of indirect pronouns because serving is done to people: je vous apporte, qu'est-ce que je lui sers, ça vous a plu. Once you hear that pattern you stop mistaking vous for a subject.

Common misconceptions

• "lui always means him." As an indirect object pronoun it means to him or to her. Je lui ai donné mon numéro works for either.
• "If English has no to, the French object is direct." Téléphoner à, répondre à, obéir à and ressembler à all take à, although English attaches nothing.
• "Every à-person becomes lui." Not after penser à, tenir à, s'intéresser à, s'habituer à or faire attention à, which keep à plus a stressed pronoun: je pense à toi.
• "The participle agrees with lui and leur too." It never does. Agreement is triggered only by a preceding direct object.
• "Le menu is the list of dishes." That is la carte. Le menu or la formule is a fixed-price set meal, which is usually the cheaper way to eat.

Where this leaves us

French splits object pronouns into two sets, and the split matters only in the third person. A noun with no preposition becomes le, la or les; a person introduced by à becomes lui or leur, for either gender. Me, te, nous and vous are shared by both sets and give you no trouble. The position is identical in every structure: in front of the single verb, in front of the infinitive, in front of the auxiliary, and inside the ne and pas of a negative. Only direct objects make a past participle agree, so je les ai vues but je leur ai parlé. Learn each verb with its preposition, because English is no guide: téléphoner, répondre, obéir and ressembler all take à. And remember the small counter-list, penser à, tenir à, s'intéresser à, s'habituer à and faire attention à, where the person stays behind the verb as à plus moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux or elles.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Indirect object pronouns. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Disjunctive (stressed) pronouns. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). La reprise ou l'omission du pronom personnel complément. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Prix fixe. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

On the platform at Nantes, two friends are deciding how to get to the hostel. One says: Tu y vas comment? The other answers: J'y vais à pied. Et toi, tu en viens? Four words, four words, and a beginner who knows every word in the dictionary still cannot translate them, because neither y nor en has a fixed English equivalent. They are placeholders: each stands for a phrase that was said earlier or is obvious from the situation.

The exchange means: How are you getting there? I am walking there. And you, have you just come from there? Once you see that y has swallowed à l'auberge and en has swallowed de l'auberge, the rest of the lesson is bookkeeping.

y: the pronoun of à and of places

Two jobs, and they overlap.

1. A place. Whatever the preposition, if a phrase names where, y replaces it: à Paris, en France, dans la cuisine, sur la table, chez le médecin, au lycée. Tu vas au lycée? Oui, j'y vais. Are you going to school? Yes, I am going there.
2. à plus a thing or an idea. Never a person. Tu penses à l'examen? Oui, j'y pense. Are you thinking about the exam? Yes, I am thinking about it. Elle a répondu à la question? Elle y a répondu. She answered it.

That second job comes with the boundary you already met: à plus a person becomes lui or leur (for most verbs) or stays as à plus a stressed pronoun (for penser à and its friends). So je pense à mon frère gives je pense à lui, never j'y pense, while je pense à mon travail gives j'y pense.

A handful of expressions are frozen with y and are among the most frequent things you will hear in France: il y a (there is, there are), on y va (let us go), j'y vais (I am off), vas-y (go on, go ahead), allons-y (let us go), ça y est (that is it, done).

en: the pronoun of de, and of amounts

Three jobs this time.

1. de plus a noun, after a verb that governs de. Tu parles de ton voyage? J'en parle. I am talking about it. Other common ones: avoir besoin de, avoir envie de, avoir peur de, s'occuper de, se souvenir de, venir de.
2. A partitive or an indefinite plural. Tu veux du pain? Oui, j'en veux. Yes, I want some. Elle a des amis à Genève? Elle en a. She has some.
3. A counted or measured quantity, and this is the one learners drop. When the original phrase carried a number or a quantity word, that number or word stays at the end of the sentence. J'ai deux frères. J'en ai deux. I have two. Il boit beaucoup de café. Il en boit beaucoup. He drinks a lot of it. Nous avons pris trois billets. Nous en avons pris trois. We took three.

The point: y goes with à and with places; en goes with de and with amounts. If you can spot which preposition the original phrase had, you have already chosen.

Position, negation, and the participle that does not move

Both behave exactly like le, la, les, lui and leur. Before the single verb: j'y vais. Before the infinitive: je vais y aller, je veux en acheter. Before the auxiliary: j'y suis allé, j'en ai acheté. Wrapped by the negative: je n'y vais pas, je n'en ai pas acheté.

One quiet rule worth stating: en never makes a past participle agree, even when the thing it replaces is feminine or plural. Des cartes postales? J'en ai acheté. The participle stays bare. Compare Les cartes postales? Je les ai achetées.

And when both turn up together, y comes before en: Il y en a. There are some. Il n'y en a plus. There are none left. That little phrase, il n'y en a plus, is worth learning as a block; you will hear it in every bakery at four in the afternoon.

What your mouth does: liaison with y and en

Because both words begin with a vowel sound, the consonant in front of them is pronounced, and it is often a consonant you would otherwise never hear.

That last pair is a spelling rule with a reason. The tu imperative of an -er verb normally has no s (mange!, va!), but before y or en the s comes back so that there is something to link with: vas-y, manges-en, penses-y.

Travel, lodging, and asking your way

Now the conversation, in vous, which is compulsory with a stranger in the street whatever their age.

Read the last three lines again for en. Je n'en ai pas replaces de réservation. Il y en a un keeps the number un at the end, because en never carries the quantity itself. Vous en voulez une does the same with une.

Why this matters: a French speaker giving you directions will use y and en constantly, and if you hear them as noise you lose the whole sentence. Hearing vous y êtes presque as "you are almost there" is the difference between arriving and not.

Common misconceptions

• "y means there and en means some." Those are the commonest translations, not definitions. J'y pense is I am thinking about it, and j'en ai trois is I have three.
• "y can replace a person after à." It cannot. People take lui, leur or à plus a stressed pronoun. Je pense à ma soeur gives je pense à elle.
• "With en you drop the number." The opposite: the number stays. Combien de frères as-tu? J'en ai deux, never j'en ai on its own if you mean two.
• "en makes the participle agree like les." It does not. Des pommes? J'en ai mangé, with no agreement at all.
• "vas-y is a spelling mistake for va-y." The s is deliberate and exists only to create the liaison. Same with manges-en and penses-y.

Pulling it together

y stands for a place, whatever preposition introduced it, and for à plus a thing or an idea. en stands for de plus a noun, for the partitive du, de la and des, and for a quantity, in which case the number or quantity word stays at the end: j'en ai deux, il en boit beaucoup. Neither can replace a person: people take lui, leur, or à plus moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux, elles. Both sit exactly where every other object pronoun sits, before the verb they belong to, inside the ne and pas of a negative, and before the infinitive when there are two verbs. en never triggers participle agreement. When the two meet, y comes first, which gives the everyday il y en a and il n'y en a plus. And both force a liaison, which is why the tu imperative grows an s in vas-y, manges-en and penses-y.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). The pronoun y. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). The pronoun en. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Le pronom personnel en. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). French pronouns: adverbial pronouns y and en. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two sentences about the same pen, ten seconds apart. Tu me le prêtes? Will you lend it to me? Prête-le-moi. Lend it to me. Same verb, same two pronouns, and everything has moved: the order of the pronouns has flipped, they have jumped to the other side of the verb, me has become moi, and two hyphens have appeared. This lesson is a procedure for producing all of that reliably, and then a second procedure for undoing it in the negative.

Step one: the order in front of the verb

When two object pronouns stand before a verb, French fixes their order absolutely. There is nothing to reason out; there is a column chart, and you read it left to right.

Take any two pronouns, find their columns, and write them in column order. That is the whole rule for the pre-verbal position.

Rows four and five are the point of the chart. In the first three rows the indirect pronoun comes first, matching the English word order almost by accident. In rows four and five, where the indirect pronoun is lui or leur, the order reverses and the direct pronoun comes first: le lui, la leur, les lui, les leur. Those four combinations are worth saying aloud until they feel automatic, because they are the ones that arrive in real conversation.

In short: me te se nous vous, then le la les, then lui leur, then y, then en. First and third person swap places, and the chart already knows it.

Step two: the affirmative imperative, where everything moves

The one structure in French where object pronouns follow the verb is the affirmative command. Three things change at once.

1. The pronouns go after the verb, attached with hyphens.
2. The order changes: the direct object comes first, then the indirect, then y, then en. So it is always le before moi, never the reverse.
3. me becomes moi and te becomes toi, because the pronoun is now stressed by its position.

Row four is the exception inside the exception. Before en, moi and toi shrink back to m' and t': donne-m'en, va-t'en (go away). You will meet va-t'en and allez-vous-en constantly in films and they are the same construction.

Step three: the negative imperative, where everything moves back

A negative command behaves like an ordinary sentence. The pronouns return to the front, in the chart order, and moi and toi revert to me and te.

So the sequence to hold in mind is: normal order, then the affirmative imperative flips and moves it behind the verb, then the negative imperative puts it all back. Two of the three positions are identical, which halves what you have to learn.

Step four: two pronouns in the passé composé

Both pronouns go in front of the auxiliary, in chart order, and the negative wraps that whole block. Then the agreement rule from Lesson 4 runs as usual: the participle agrees with a preceding direct object and ignores everything else.

Key idea: the two pronouns travel as one block. Whatever the structure, put the block where a single pronoun would have gone, and order it internally with the chart.

One worked example, end to end, then the same example flipped

Start from a full sentence: Tu rends les clés à ta soeur. You give the keys back to your sister.

1. Identify the objects. Les clés is direct: you give back what? the keys. À ta soeur is indirect, because rendre governs à for the person.
2. Choose the pronouns. Feminine plural direct object gives les. Singular person after à gives lui.
3. Order them. Column 2 before column 3: les lui.
4. Place the block before the verb: Tu les lui rends. You give them back to her.
5. Make it a command. Affirmative, so the block moves behind with hyphens and the direct object stays first: Rends-les-lui. Give them back to her.
6. Make it a past statement. Block before the auxiliary, participle agrees with the preceding direct object les, which is feminine plural: Tu les lui as rendues.
7. Negate the command: Ne les lui rends pas.

Now change one input. Suppose it is not the keys but some money, de l'argent, and not your sister but your parents. Direct object becomes a partitive, so it is en, and the person becomes plural, so it is leur. The chart says column 3 before column 5: Tu leur en rends. The command is Rends-leur-en. And the past is Tu leur en as rendu, with a bare participle, because en never agrees. One changed input, and the order, the spelling and the agreement all come out differently.

Common misconceptions

• "Donne-moi-le is right because moi comes first in speech." It is not French. The affirmative imperative puts the direct object first: donne-le-moi.
• "The order is always indirect then direct, like English to me it." Only in the first and second person. With lui and leur it reverses: je le lui donne.
• "Negative commands also put the pronouns after the verb." They do not. Ne me le donne pas uses the ordinary pre-verbal order.
• "Moi is used in every imperative." Not before en, where it contracts: donne-m'en, va-t'en.
• "With two pronouns the participle agrees with whichever comes first." It agrees only with a preceding direct object, so in je le lui ai rendu it is le that matters and lui that does not.

The takeaway

Two object pronouns in front of a verb follow a fixed chart: me te se nous vous, then le la les, then lui leur, then y, then en. That means the indirect pronoun comes first in the first and second persons and second in the third, giving le lui, la leur and their partners. The affirmative imperative is the only structure that moves pronouns behind the verb, joining them with hyphens, reversing to direct before indirect, and turning me and te into moi and toi, except before en where they contract to m' and t'. A negative command undoes all of that and restores the normal order. In compound tenses the block stands in front of the auxiliary, and the participle agrees with the direct pronoun alone, never with lui, leur or en.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Order of object pronouns. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). The imperative mood. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Pronoms personnels employés avec un verbe à l'impératif. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Formes de l'impératif. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca

Open a French weather bulletin and count the tenses. There is only one. Demain matin, le ciel sera couvert sur la Bretagne. Les températures ne dépasseront pas huit degrés. Dans l'après-midi, la pluie gagnera le Massif central et le vent se lèvera sur la côte. Il faudra rouler prudemment. Tomorrow morning the sky will be overcast over Brittany. Temperatures will not go above eight degrees. In the afternoon the rain will reach the Massif Central and the wind will pick up on the coast. Driving will need care.

Five verbs, five futurs simples: sera, dépasseront, gagnera, se lèvera, faudra. In French I you learned to say what you are going to do with aller plus an infinitive. That still works and is still what people say about this evening. This lesson gives you the other future, the one used for forecasts, timetables, promises, predictions and anything more than a few hours away.

The two futures, and when each one turns up

The boundary is soft. Je vais t'appeler ce soir and je t'appellerai ce soir are both normal. What is not soft is the written register: a newspaper, a timetable and a school report will use the futur simple, so you need to read it even if you speak mostly in the other one.

Building it, which is the easiest formation in French

Take the infinitive. Add the present-tense endings of avoir: -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont. For -re verbs, drop the final e first so that the stem still ends in r.

Notice what that gives you: every future form in the language contains an r before the ending, with no exceptions at all. If you cannot hear an r, it is not a future. That single fact is worth more than any table, because it lets you recognise the tense in speech.

What matters here: infinitive plus the endings of avoir, minus the final e of an -re verb. The r is compulsory and it is your ear's marker.

The stems you have to learn, all fifteen of them

A small set of very common verbs replaces the infinitive with a shortened stem. The endings never change. Every stem still ends in r.

Four of these have a doubled r, and it is pronounced longer than a single one in careful speech: verrai, enverrai, pourrai, courrai (from courir). The doubling is what distinguishes je verrai, I will see, from je verrais, I would see, in writing, though not reliably in the ear.

Two spelling families change quietly. Verbs like acheter and se lever carry their grave accent through the whole tense: j'achèterai, tu achèteras, il se lèvera. Verbs like appeler and jeter double the consonant throughout: j'appellerai, je jetterai. And verbs in -yer change y to i: je paierai, j'essaierai, il nettoiera.

The rule English speakers keep breaking: quand plus the future

In English we say "when I am older, I will travel", with a present after "when". French refuses this. If the second half of the sentence is in the future, the clause after quand, lorsque, dès que, aussitôt que or tant que must also be in the future.

Look at row three. The main clause is an imperative, not a future, and the rule still applies: French is marking that the arriving has not happened yet. This is one of the highest-value corrections in the whole course, because the wrong version is grammatical-looking, extremely common in learner writing, and immediately audible to a French ear.

Two more uses worth having. The futur simple softens an instruction into something like a polite expectation: Vous trouverez les toilettes au fond du couloir. You will find the toilets at the end of the corridor. And it carries a promise: Je te le rendrai demain, promis. I will give it back to you tomorrow, I promise.

The upshot: after quand, dès que, lorsque, aussitôt que and tant que, French puts the future where English puts the present.

The vocabulary this tense gets used on

Climate and environment is where a French fifteen-year-old meets the futur simple most often, because it is the tense of every prediction in a science textbook.

A paragraph in the register you would actually read: Si nous ne changeons rien, les étés seront plus secs et les hivers plus doux. Il y aura plus d'inondations sur les côtes. Nous devrons réduire notre empreinte carbone et nous prendrons plus souvent les transports en commun. Quand les énergies renouvelables coûteront moins cher, elles remplaceront une partie des énergies fossiles.

(If we change nothing, summers will be drier and winters milder. There will be more flooding on the coasts. We will have to reduce our carbon footprint and we will take public transport more often. When renewable energy costs less, it will replace part of our fossil fuel use.)

Every verb after the first clause is a futur simple, including coûteront after quand, which English would leave in the present. The treaty that gave this vocabulary its current shape is the Accord de Paris, negotiated by 196 parties at the 2015 United Nations climate conference held near Paris, whose central goal is to hold the rise in global surface temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Common misconceptions

• "The futur proche is informal and the futur simple is correct." Both are correct. The difference is how near and how planned the event feels, and how formal the medium is.
• "You add the endings to the stem of the verb." To the infinitive, not to a stem you have to find: parler gives parlerai, with the whole infinitive intact.
• "Some future stems do not end in r." None. Every one of the fifteen irregular stems ends in r, which is why the r is a reliable signal.
• "Quand takes the present, as in English." Not when the sentence is about the future: quand j'aurai dix-huit ans.
• "je parlerai and je parlerais sound the same, so the spelling does not matter." Many speakers do merge them, but the spelling separates a future from a conditional, and in writing that is a difference of meaning, not of accent.

Summing up

The futur simple is the infinitive plus -ai, -as, -a, -ons, -ez, -ont, with the final e of an -re verb dropped. Fifteen common verbs swap the infinitive for a short stem, and every one of those stems ends in r, which makes the r the audible signature of the whole tense. Accent and consonant changes in acheter, appeler and payer carry through every person. Beside it sits the futur proche, aller plus an infinitive, which is what you say about tonight, while the futur simple is what you write in a forecast, a timetable or a promise. The rule that costs learners most marks is the one after quand, lorsque, dès que, aussitôt que and tant que, where French insists on the future and English does not.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Simple future: regular formation. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Simple future: irregular stems. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Le futur simple. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Paris Agreement: long-term temperature goal and 2015 negotiation. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two sentences at a ticket counter in Nantes, said by two people in the same queue. Je veux un aller-retour pour Rennes. I want a return to Rennes. Je voudrais un aller-retour pour Rennes, s'il vous plaît. I would like a return to Rennes, please. Both get the ticket. Only the second one gets a smile, and the difference between them is four letters.

That gap between je veux and je voudrais is the conditional doing the most useful of its jobs. It has three others, and all four fall out of one idea: the conditional puts a small distance between the speaker and the statement. Distance can mean politeness, or a suggestion rather than an instruction, or a hypothesis rather than a fact, or a report you do not vouch for.

Building it: you already know both halves

Take the future stem from the last lesson. Add the endings of the imparfait. That is the entire formation, and it means the fifteen irregular stems you learned yesterday are still the only irregularities.

Now the comparison that keeps the two tenses apart. Read across.

In the je, tu and il forms the two tenses differ by one letter, and in careful French they differ in vowel quality too: je ferai ends in a closed vowel like the é of été, je ferais in an open one like the è of père. Many speakers merge the two, so do not rely on hearing it; rely on the nous and vous forms, where ferons and ferions are unmistakably different.

Remember: future stem plus imparfait endings. If you can build one tense you can build the other, and the fifteen irregular stems are shared.

Job one: asking without demanding

French politeness runs on the conditional to a degree English does not. Using the present with a stranger is not an insult, but it marks you.

Four formulas are worth memorising whole, because you will use them daily: je voudrais, j'aimerais, pourriez-vous and auriez-vous. Note that je voudrais is not a softened version of a want; it has effectively replaced je veux in shops, cafés, stations and offices.

Job two: advice, which is a suggestion and not an order

An imperative tells someone what to do. A conditional suggests it and leaves them room.

Devoir in the conditional is the single most useful advice verb in French: tu devrais is exactly English "you should". Beside it, il faudrait softens the blunt il faut, and à ta place or à votre place introduces advice the way English uses "if I were you".

Job three: the hypothesis, in outline

The conditional is the tense that completes a sentence beginning si plus the imparfait. The next lesson takes this apart properly, but you can already read it.

Si j'avais plus de temps, je lirais davantage. If I had more time, I would read more. Si nous habitions à Paris, nous irions au musée tous les mois. If we lived in Paris, we would go to the museum every month.

Notice what is not there: no conditional after si. French never puts a conditional directly after si in this construction, and writing si j'aurais is the error French schoolchildren are drilled out of with a rhyme. You will meet it again in Lesson 10.

Job four: news you do not vouch for

French journalism uses the conditional to report an unconfirmed claim, where English adds "reportedly" or "allegedly". L'accident aurait fait trois blessés. The accident reportedly injured three people. Le musée fermerait en janvier. The museum is said to be closing in January. The tense is doing the same distancing work as in a polite request: the speaker declines to guarantee the statement. You do not need to produce this, but you need to read it, because it appears in every French newspaper.

The complaint, in vous

Complaining in French is a register exercise. The conditional keeps you polite while you are being firm, which is exactly what you want at a counter.

Useful words from that scene: le ticket de caisse (till receipt), rembourser (to refund), échanger (to exchange), la garantie (guarantee), défectueux (faulty), une réclamation (a formal complaint), le responsable (the person in charge).

Why this matters: a complaint made in the present tense sounds like an accusation. The same complaint in the conditional sounds like a request, and in France that is the difference between being served and being stonewalled.

Common misconceptions

• "The conditional is a tense about the past." It is not a past at all. It is built from a future stem, and it points at something unreal, unconfirmed or merely proposed.
• "je voudrais is old-fashioned." It is the ordinary way to order anything in France. Je veux in a cafe sounds like a small child.
• "Si takes the conditional." Never in this construction: si j'avais, not si j'aurais. The conditional goes in the other half of the sentence.
• "You can hear the difference between je parlerai and je parlerais." In careful speech yes, as a closed against an open vowel, but many speakers merge them. Use the nous and vous forms, parlerons against parlerions, to test yourself.
• "The conditional in a newspaper means the writer is speculating personally." It is a formal signal that the information is unconfirmed, roughly English reportedly.

What you now know

The present conditional is the future stem plus the imparfait endings, which means it inherits every irregular stem from the future and adds none of its own. It does four jobs, all versions of one idea: it puts distance between the speaker and the statement. It makes a request polite, and je voudrais, j'aimerais, pourriez-vous and auriez-vous are the four formulas to have ready. It turns an order into advice with tu devrais, il faudrait and à ta place. It completes a hypothesis begun with si plus the imparfait, and it never appears immediately after si. And in news writing it marks a claim the writer will not vouch for. In writing, the letter s separates it from the future, and in a complaint at a shop counter it is what keeps you firm and civil at the same time.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). The conditional. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Généralités sur le conditionnel. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Valeur modale du conditionnel. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Conditional mood: French. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A student wrote this in a class blog about phones: Si j'aurais un meilleur portable, je prendrais de meilleures photos. She meant "If I had a better phone, I would take better pictures", and every word is a real French word. The sentence is still wrong, and wrong in the one way French teachers never let pass. Work out why and you have the whole lesson.

The rule is easy to state and easy to remember once you have seen it broken: a conditional never follows si directly. In the sentence above the conditional is in the wrong half. Move it, put an imparfait after si, and the sentence is correct: Si j'avais un meilleur portable, je prendrais de meilleures photos. French schoolchildren are taught it as a warning about the letter s, since the forbidden forms all end in -rais, -rait or -raient.

The two systems, laid out

French organises hypotheses into two patterns, and the choice between them is a choice about how likely you think the thing is.

Three more pairs, because the pattern only becomes automatic when you have seen the same content in both systems.

Row two of that table shows System 1 with a plain present in the main clause, which is very common in speech and slightly more casual than the future. Row three shows it with an imperative, which is how instructions and safety notices are written: Si le voyant rouge s'allume, appelez le service technique. If the red light comes on, call technical support.

The core of it: after si you put a présent or an imparfait, and never a futur or a conditionnel. The tense with the r goes in the other half.

Either half can come first

The si clause is not fixed to the beginning of the sentence. When it comes first, a comma separates the two halves; when it comes second, no comma.

Si j'étais riche, j'achèterais une maison en Bretagne. If I were rich, I would buy a house in Brittany. J'achèterais une maison en Bretagne si j'étais riche. I would buy a house in Brittany if I were rich.

The meaning is identical; only the emphasis moves. Also note the elision: si becomes s' before il and ils, and only before those two words. S'il pleut, s'ils viennent, but si elle vient and si on part, with no apostrophe.

A third system you should read but need not yet write

There is a past version, built on the plus-que-parfait you learned in Lesson 2 and a compound conditional: Si j'avais su, je ne serais pas venu. If I had known, I would not have come. Si tu m'avais écrit, je t'aurais répondu. If you had written to me, I would have replied. It is the regret system, for things that did not happen and now cannot. You will meet it constantly in reading and in films, and the same prohibition applies: after si you get a plus-que-parfait, never a conditional. Producing it reliably is a Year 3 target; recognising it is a Year 2 one.

The other si, which is not a hypothesis at all

French uses the same three letters for a second job: reporting a yes-or-no question, where English says "whether" or "if". Crucially, the tense restriction does not apply here, because this si is not introducing a condition.

How do you tell them apart? Try replacing si with "whether" in English. If the sentence still makes sense, you have the reporting si and the tenses are free. If you have to use "if", it is a condition and the rule bites.

A third, smaller si means "so" or "such" before an adjective: Il est si gentil. He is so kind. And a fourth is the si you already know from French I, the yes that contradicts a negative question.

Media, technology and the sentences people actually write about them

Now a short paragraph using both systems on that vocabulary. Si tu télécharges cette appli, tu pourras regarder les vidéos hors connexion. Mais si tu ne changeais pas ton mot de passe de temps en temps, tu prendrais un vrai risque. À ta place, je vérifierais aussi les paramètres de vie privée. Si un inconnu t'envoie un lien, ne clique pas dessus.

(If you download this app, you will be able to watch the videos offline. But if you did not change your password from time to time, you would be taking a real risk. If I were you, I would also check the privacy settings. If a stranger sends you a link, do not click on it.)

Three si clauses, two systems, and one imperative in the main clause of the last one. The word courriel in the table is worth a flag: it is the standard word in Quebec and is used in French official writing, while in everyday France people mostly say un mail. Lesson 16 comes back to that split.

Bottom line: decide first whether you are describing something that could really happen or something you are imagining. The tense pair follows from that decision and not the other way round.

Common misconceptions

• "Si takes the conditional because it is a conditional sentence." The clause after si never does. The conditional lives in the other half.
• "Si plus imparfait is about the past." It is about the unreal present or future: si j'avais le temps means if I had time now, not yesterday.
• "Si always elides." Only before il and ils. Si elle, si on and si un ami keep the i.
• "You cannot use a future after si." You cannot after the conditional si, but you can after the si that means whether: je ne sais pas s'il viendra is correct.
• "The si clause has to come first." Either order works. The comma is the only thing that changes.

Looking back

A French hypothesis comes in two shapes. For something that might really happen, si takes the present and the other half takes the futur simple, a plain present, or an imperative. For something imagined or contrary to fact, si takes the imparfait and the other half takes the conditional. A third system, si plus the plus-que-parfait with a compound conditional, expresses regret and is worth recognising now and producing later. The one thing French forbids is a verb in -rais or -rai immediately after si: the tense with the r always belongs to the other clause. Si elides only before il and ils. And the same three letters introduce a reported yes-or-no question meaning whether, where no tense restriction applies at all, which is why je ne sais pas s'il viendra is perfectly correct.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Si clauses: summary. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Conditionnel dans les phrases hypothétiques. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Conditional sentence: French conditional sentences. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Past conditional. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu

Pinned inside the door of a French lycée, a notice to candidates before an exam: Il faut que vous arriviez trente minutes avant l'épreuve. Il faut que vous éteigniez vos téléphones. Nous voulons que chaque candidat apporte une pièce d'identité. You must arrive thirty minutes before the exam. You must switch off your phones. We want each candidate to bring identification.

Look at the verbs: arriviez, éteigniez, apporte. Two of them look like the imparfait but are not, and the third looks like a third-person present but follows chaque candidat, a singular subject, after a verb that is not in the present at all in English. They are subjunctives, and this lesson builds them from scratch.

First a word about what the subjonctif is. It is not a tense: it does not tell you when. It is a mood, which is to say it marks the attitude of the sentence towards its own content. The indicative states what is; the subjunctive appears where a verb of wanting, needing, feeling or doubting has already made the second half of the sentence something other than a plain fact.

Step one: find the stem

Take the ils form of the present indicative. Chop off -ent. What remains is the subjunctive stem.

This one move handles a great many verbs that are irregular in the present indicative, which is the point of using the ils form rather than the infinitive. Écrire and connaître give you no trouble at all.

Step two: add the endings

The endings are -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent for every verb in the language except avoir and être. You have seen the first three before, on -er verbs in the present. You have seen the -ions and -iez on the imparfait.

Two things fall out of that table. For -er verbs, four of the six forms are identical to the present indicative, so most of the time you are not producing anything new at all: que je parle and je parle look and sound the same. And the nous and vous forms are identical to the imparfait: que nous parlions and nous parlions. That overlap is why French speakers rarely notice they are using the subjunctive.

The point: take the ils form, drop -ent, and add -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent. That covers almost the whole language.

Step three: the verbs with two stems

A group of common verbs has one stem in the je, tu, il and ils forms and another in nous and vous. The rule is still mechanical: the first stem is the ils form of the present, and the second is the nous form of the present.

If you already know that the present indicative of venir is je viens, nous venons, ils viennent, this table contains nothing new. The subjunctive is simply borrowing both stems.

Step four: what puts the subjunctive there in the first place

The mood never appears on its own. It is triggered by something in the main clause plus the word que. This lesson covers the first family of triggers: necessity and will.

Notice how often English uses an infinitive where French uses a whole clause. "I want you to listen" has no that in it, and English speakers therefore produce the impossible je veux toi écouter or je veux tu écouter. French has no structure of that shape. When the wanting and the doing belong to different people, French must say je veux que plus a subjunctive.

The one decision you have to make: infinitive or subjunctive

This is the rule that does most of the work in real writing, and it has nothing to do with meaning. It is about whether the subject changes.

Look at the second row carefully, because il faut is the highest-frequency case. Il faut partir is impersonal: one must go, people must go, it is time to go. Il faut que je parte names the person. French speakers use both constantly, and the choice is a real one: the first is a general statement, the second is about you.

Worth holding on to: one subject, one infinitive. Two subjects, que and a subjunctive. Test it by asking who does the second verb.

Common misconceptions

• "The subjunctive is a tense that means something like might." It is a mood, and by itself it carries no meaning of possibility. It is required by the structure, not chosen for its sense.
• "Que is optional." It is not. Without que there is no subjunctive clause: je veux que tu viennes, never je veux tu viennes.
• "Espérer que takes the subjunctive because hoping is uncertain." It does not, in standard French: j'espère que tu viendras, with a future indicative. It is one of the most useful exceptions to know.
• "You must use the subjunctive after il faut." Only after il faut que. Il faut plus an infinitive is a complete and very common structure.
• "If it looks like the present, it is not a subjunctive." For -er verbs four of the six forms are identical to the present indicative. The form is a subjunctive because of where it stands, not because of how it looks.

Recap

The present subjunctive is built by taking the ils form of the present indicative, dropping -ent and adding -e, -es, -e, -ions, -iez, -ent. Because that stem comes from the plural of the present, verbs that are irregular there, such as écrire, lire and éteindre, come out correct for free. A group including venir, prendre, boire and voir uses two stems, the ils form for je, tu, il and ils, and the nous form for nous and vous. Nothing triggers the mood except the main clause: obligation with il faut que, il est nécessaire que and il vaut mieux que, and will with vouloir, souhaiter, préférer, demander and exiger, each followed by que. And the single decision that shapes every sentence is whether the subject changes: one subject takes an infinitive, two subjects take que and the subjunctive.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Regular subjunctive formation. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Subjunctive usage: obligation. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Formes du subjonctif. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Subjonctif après certains verbes. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca

On a French bulletin scolaire, the termly school report, two teachers write about the same student. The history teacher: Je suis content que Léa participe davantage. I am pleased that Léa is joining in more. The maths teacher: Je doute que Léa ait compris le chapitre sur les probabilités. I doubt Léa has understood the chapter on probability.

Both sentences use the subjunctive. Participe you can already build: ils participent, drop -ent, add -e. Ait you cannot, because avoir is one of six verbs that refuse the rule. Between them the two sentences also show the second and third families of triggers: emotion, and doubt.

The six that must be memorised

Three of these have their own endings as well as their own stems. Three keep the ordinary endings on an odd stem. All six are among the twenty most frequent verbs in French, so the memorising is unavoidable and worth it.

Read the columns for their patterns rather than trying to swallow thirty-six forms. Être and avoir are the odd ones: their nous and vous forms use a y where every other verb uses an i, giving soyons, soyez, ayons, ayez. They are also identical to the imperative forms you already know from sois sage and ayez de la patience. Aller is a two-stem verb like venir, but with an unpredictable first stem: aill- for je, tu, il and ils, and the regular all- for nous and vous. Faire, pouvoir and savoir have one strange stem each, fass-, puiss- and sach-, and then behave perfectly, taking the normal endings throughout.

Two more you will meet and should recognise: falloir gives qu'il faille, and vouloir gives que je veuille with que nous voulions.

A word on saying them. aille is one syllable, rhyming with the French word paille, straw: the letters ill after a vowel make a y sound, so qu'il aille sounds like eel-eye. fasse has the a of femme and a hissed double s, not a z. puisse has the same vowel as lui followed by the s of passe. Saying these aloud a dozen times is a better investment than copying the table.

Key idea: six verbs, six stems, and only two of them, être and avoir, change the endings as well.

The comparison that decides every sentence

Whether you get a subjunctive depends on the main clause. Here are the three families side by side.

Rows two and eight are the pair to stare at. Il est probable que takes the indicative and il est peu probable que takes the subjunctive, and the only difference between them is the word peu. That is the clearest evidence you will get that the mood is grammatical rather than semantic: French has drawn a line, and the line falls between likely and unlikely, not somewhere you could reason out from first principles.

Emotion: the second family

The subject-change rule from the previous lesson still applies. Je suis content de venir, with de plus an infinitive, when it is the same person; je suis content que tu viennes when it is someone else. Note the preposition: emotion adjectives take de before an infinitive, not à.

Doubt and denial: the third family

The pattern in the middle rows is worth naming: penser, croire and être sûr take the indicative when affirmative and the subjunctive when negated or questioned. Je pense qu'il vient, plain fact. Je ne pense pas qu'il vienne, doubt introduced by the negation. Penses-tu qu'il vienne?, same effect from the question.

Why this matters: a single ne pas in the main clause changes the mood of the verb three words later. Nothing else in French grammar reaches that far.

School and work, the vocabulary these triggers live on

Two facts that make the vocabulary usable. French marks run out of 20, and 10 out of 20 is the threshold: a student says j'ai eu 14 sur 20, and la moyenne means both the average and that pass mark. And the baccalauréat, taken at the end of the lycée, is both the school leaving certificate and the qualification that opens university, which is why French teenagers talk about le bac constantly.

A paragraph in the register of a covering letter: Je suis heureuse que votre entreprise propose des stages aux lycéens. Je ne pense pas que mon expérience soit suffisante, mais je souhaite que vous puissiez examiner ma candidature. Il est possible que je sois disponible dès le mois de juin. Je doute que ma lettre soit parfaite, mais j'espère qu'elle vous donnera envie de me rencontrer.

(I am glad that your company offers work placements to school students. I do not think my experience is sufficient, but I hope you will be able to consider my application. It is possible that I will be available from June. I doubt my letter is perfect, but I hope it will make you want to meet me.)

Five subjunctives and one indicative, and the indicative is after j'espère que, which stays stubbornly factual.

Common misconceptions

• "Anything uncertain takes the subjunctive." Il est probable que and j'espère que are both uncertain and both take the indicative. The trigger is the expression, not the degree of doubt.
• "Je pense que always takes the indicative." Affirmative yes; negated or questioned, it switches: je ne pense pas qu'il vienne.
• "que j'aille is a typing error for que j'alle." Aller really does have the stem aill- in four of its six subjunctive forms, pronounced as one syllable like paille.
• "soyons and ayons are imperatives, not subjunctives." They are both, and that is not a coincidence: the imperative of être and avoir is borrowed from the subjunctive.
• "Emotion verbs take à before an infinitive." They take de: je suis content de venir, je suis désolé de partir.

What to carry forward

Six verbs have subjunctives you cannot derive: être (sois, soyons), avoir (aie, ayons), aller (aille, allions), faire (fasse), pouvoir (puisse) and savoir (sache). Être and avoir also change the endings, taking a y where other verbs take an i. Beyond obligation and will, the mood is required by emotion, with être content, triste, désolé, surpris, avoir peur, regretter and c'est dommage, and by doubt and denial, with douter, il se peut, il est possible, il est impossible and il n'est pas sûr. Certainty, probability and hope keep the indicative, which is why il est probable que takes one mood and il est peu probable que the other. Penser, croire and être sûr sit on the line: indicative when affirmative, subjunctive when negated or questioned. And the subject-change rule still governs everything, with de plus an infinitive when the two verbs share a subject.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Irregular subjunctive formation. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Subjunctive usage: doubt. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Généralités sur le subjonctif. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Baccalauréat: the French lycée examination and its 20-point marking. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Three real numbers to compare. In 2023 the commune of Marseille had 886,040 inhabitants and the commune of Lyon had 519,127, with Paris larger than either. So: Marseille est plus grande que Lyon. Lyon est moins grande que Marseille. Paris est la plus grande ville de France. Marseille is bigger than Lyon. Lyon is smaller than Marseille. Paris is the biggest city in France.

Now two sentences written by a student who had understood exactly half of that. Marie chante plus bien que moi. Ce film est le plus bon de l'année. Both are wrong, and both are wrong in the same place. Tracing the fault is the fastest route into the whole system.

Where the reasoning breaks

The student's rule was: put plus in front of the describing word. That rule is right about ninety percent of the time. It fails on exactly two words, and they happen to be two of the most common words in the language.

bon, good, has a comparative of its own: meilleur. You cannot say plus bon, just as English cannot say "more good". bien, well, has its own too: mieux. You cannot say plus bien, just as English cannot say "more well".

So the corrections are Marie chante mieux que moi and Ce film est le meilleur de l'année. But now there is a second problem hiding in the first: how do you know that chante needs mieux and film needs meilleur? Because one is describing an action and the other a thing. bon and meilleur are adjectives, describing nouns. bien and mieux are adverbs, describing verbs. English blurs this (people say "he did good"), French does not.

One useful test: if you can put très in front of it and it still describes a thing, it is an adjective and takes meilleur. If it answers "how?" after a verb, it is an adverb and takes mieux. C'est bon is the taste of the food; ça va bien is how you are.

The point: meilleur for things, mieux for actions, and never plus bon or plus bien.

The four structures, one for each kind of word

Everything else in comparison is regular, and the only thing to get right is which frame to use.

Three details that catch people out. The word for equality is aussi with adjectives and adverbs but autant with nouns and verbs: aussi grand que, but autant de temps que and je mange autant que toi. Nouns need the de: plus de livres, never plus livres. And after que French uses a stressed pronoun, so it is que moi, que toi, que lui, qu'elle, que nous, que vous, qu'eux, never que je.

Adjectives still agree with what they describe, and the comparative does not change that: Ces chaussures sont moins chères que les autres. These shoes are less expensive than the others. Meilleur agrees too: Cette tarte est meilleure. Mieux, being an adverb, never changes shape at all.

You can also quantify a comparison: beaucoup plus cher (much more expensive), un peu moins grand (a little smaller), deux fois plus rapide (twice as fast), trois fois moins cher (a third of the price, literally three times less expensive).

The superlative, and the small rule about position

A superlative is a comparative with a definite article welded to the front: le plus, la plus, les plus, le moins, la moins, les moins.

Where it goes depends on where the adjective would normally go. Most French adjectives follow their noun, and when they do, the article is written twice: once for the noun and once for the superlative.

That doubled article in rows one and two looks like a mistake and is not. La ville la plus intéressante is the standard form, and dropping one of the articles is a clear error.

The superlative of an adverb always takes le, whatever the subject, because there is no noun to agree with: C'est elle qui court le plus vite. She is the one who runs fastest. Ce sont eux qui travaillent le mieux. They are the ones who work best.

And the preposition for "in" after a superlative is de, not dans or en: le plus grand musée de Paris, the biggest museum in Paris; la meilleure élève de la classe, the best student in the class; le plus long fleuve de France, the longest river in France.

In short: le or la or les plus, doubled article when the adjective follows its noun, always le with an adverb, and de where English says in.

Reading the same data three ways

Take the two population figures from the opening, both for the commune rather than the wider urban area, and both for 2023. Marseille 886,040; Lyon 519,127.

• Adjective. Marseille est plus peuplée que Lyon. Marseille is more populous than Lyon.
• Noun. Marseille a plus d'habitants que Lyon. Marseille has more inhabitants than Lyon.
• Quantified. Marseille a presque deux fois plus d'habitants que Lyon. Marseille has nearly twice as many inhabitants as Lyon.
• Superlative. Paris est la commune la plus peuplée de France; Marseille est la deuxième. Paris is the most populous commune in France; Marseille is second.
• Equality, which here is false. Lyon n'a pas autant d'habitants que Marseille. Lyon does not have as many inhabitants as Marseille.

Note that the adjective structure needs no de and the noun structure does. That is the single commonest slip in this area of grammar, and comparing the second and third bullets above is the fastest way to fix it.

Common misconceptions

• "plus bon is acceptable in speech." It is not French. The one place plus bon survives is in a fixed comparison of two bad options, and even there most speakers avoid it.
• "mieux and meilleur are interchangeable." They are different parts of speech. Elle est meilleure describes her; elle joue mieux describes her playing.
• "aussi works for everything." Only with adjectives and adverbs. Nouns and verbs take autant: autant de temps, je mange autant.
• "La ville la plus belle has one article too many." It has exactly the right number. The doubling is compulsory when the adjective follows its noun.
• "Use dans or en for in after a superlative." French uses de: le plus grand musée de Paris.

The short version

Comparison in French comes in four frames: plus, moins or aussi plus an adjective or adverb, plus de, moins de or autant de plus a noun, and a verb followed by plus, moins or autant. The second half is introduced by que and takes a stressed pronoun, so it is que moi and not que je. Adjectives keep agreeing, adverbs never change. Two words refuse the pattern: bon becomes meilleur and bien becomes mieux, and the choice between them is the choice between describing a thing and describing an action. Superlatives are the same forms with a definite article in front, doubled when the adjective follows its noun, always le for an adverb, and followed by de where English says in. You can scale any comparison with beaucoup, un peu or deux fois.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Comparison of adjectives. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Superlative of adjectives. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). bon/meilleur (adjectives) vs. bien/mieux (adverbs). In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Marseille and Lyon: commune populations for 2023. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Here is a paragraph written by someone with a vocabulary of two thousand words and no way to join a sentence. J'ai un ami. Il habite à Genève. Je l'ai rencontré en 2022. Je t'ai parlé de lui. Son père est médecin. I have a friend. He lives in Geneva. I met him in 2022. I told you about him. His father is a doctor.

Every sentence is correct. The paragraph is still unreadable, because five facts about one person arrive as five separate announcements. French has four small words that weld them together, and by the end of this lesson the paragraph will be one sentence.

qui and que: the only question is what is missing

A relative pronoun stands in for a noun and drags a whole clause along behind it. To choose between qui and que, look at the clause that follows and ask what it lacks.

• If the clause has no subject, use qui. Qui is the subject.
• If the clause has a subject already but no direct object, use que. Que is the object.

Two mechanical signals help. qui is never shortened: it is always qui est, qui a, qui habite, never qu'est. que elides: qu'il, qu'elle, qu'on. So if you see an apostrophe after the q, you are looking at que. And qui is almost always followed immediately by a verb, while que is almost always followed by a subject.

English lets you drop the relative pronoun: "the book I am looking for". French never does. Le livre je cherche is not a sentence. The que is compulsory.

Key idea: qui when the following verb has no subject, que when it has a subject but no object. Look at what the clause is missing, not at whether the noun is a person.

The agreement that follows que

You met this rule in Lesson 4 with object pronouns, and it applies here for exactly the same reason: que is a direct object standing before the verb.

La lettre que j'ai écrite est partie ce matin. The letter I wrote went off this morning. Les photos que tu as prises sont très belles. The photos you took are lovely. Le film que nous avons vu était long. The film we saw was long.

In the first two the participle agrees with lettre and photos; in the third, film is masculine singular, so nothing shows. Nothing of the kind happens after qui, because qui is a subject and not an object: la lettre qui est arrivée agrees for a completely different reason, namely that arriver takes être.

où: place, and also time

où replaces a phrase naming a place: la ville où je suis né, the town where I was born; le pays où nous allons, the country we are going to. That much matches English.

What does not match is that French uses the same word for time. English says "the day when" or just "the day"; French says le jour où.

Do not reach for quand here. Le jour quand is a direct translation of English and it is wrong.

dont: the one that replaces de

dont stands in for de plus a noun. Whenever the second sentence would have contained de, du, de la or des attached to the thing you are describing, the joining word is dont. It covers three situations that look unrelated in English.

Row three deserves attention. English uses "whose", and English speakers therefore expect the possessive to survive. It does not: French switches to the article. dont le père, not dont son père. Likewise une maison dont les fenêtres sont cassées, a house whose windows are broken.

The verbs and expressions that make dont necessary are the same ones that took en in Lesson 6: parler de, avoir besoin de, avoir envie de, avoir peur de, se souvenir de, s'occuper de, être fier de, être content de, être responsable de. If the phrase would have become en in a short answer, it becomes dont in a relative clause.

The upshot: qui for a missing subject, que for a missing object, où for a missing place or time, dont for a missing de.

Now the paragraph, in one sentence

J'ai un ami qui habite à Genève, que j'ai rencontré en 2022, dont je t'ai parlé, et dont le père est médecin.

(I have a friend who lives in Geneva, whom I met in 2022, whom I told you about, and whose father is a doctor.)

Four relatives, four different reasons. qui because habite needs a subject. que because j'ai rencontré needs an object. dont twice, first because parler governs de and second because le père de mon ami contains de. In real writing you would break this into two sentences, but the exercise shows what each word is doing.

ce qui, ce que, ce dont: when there is no noun to attach to

Sometimes the thing you are describing is not a noun at all but a whole idea. English uses "what"; French puts ce in front of the relative.

The test is identical to the one for qui and que. Add ce, then ask what the clause is missing.

Common misconceptions

• "qui is for people and que is for things." This is the single most damaging myth about French relatives. Le train qui arrive is a thing taking qui; l'homme que je vois is a person taking que. Grammar decides, not animacy.
• "You can leave out que, as English leaves out that." Never. Le livre que je cherche keeps its que in every register.
• "Use quand after le jour." French says le jour où. Quand joins clauses about time but does not attach to a noun this way.
• "dont son père is the way to say whose father." It is dont le père. The possessive disappears because dont already carries the de.
• "Participles never agree after a relative." They agree after que, which is a preceding direct object: les photos que tu as prises.

Where this leaves us

Four words do nearly all the joining in French. Use qui when the clause that follows has no subject, and remember that it never elides and is almost always followed straight by a verb. Use que when the clause has a subject but no direct object, remember that it does elide, and remember that it triggers participle agreement in compound tenses. Use où for both place and time, which is why le jour où is right and le jour quand is not. Use dont wherever the second sentence would have contained de, whether that de came from a verb like parler de, an expression like avoir besoin de, an adjective like fier de, or plain possession, in which case the possessive gives way to the article. And when the thing being described is an idea rather than a noun, put ce in front and run the same test: ce qui, ce que, ce dont.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Relative pronouns: qui and que. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Relative pronouns: dont and related forms. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Le pronom relatif dont. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Relative pronouns: ce qui and ce que. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu

At the lost property desk of a station in Tours, a clerk works through a form with a traveller. Every answer is a different negative.

Vous avez perdu quelque chose aujourd'hui? Non, je n'ai rien perdu aujourd'hui. Quelqu'un vous a aidé? Non, personne ne m'a aidé. Vous avez déjà rempli ce formulaire? Non, je ne l'ai jamais rempli. Vous avez encore le billet? Non, je ne l'ai plus. Vous avez combien de bagages? Je n'ai qu'un sac.

(Have you lost something today? No, I have not lost anything today. Did somebody help you? No, nobody helped me. Have you filled in this form before? No, I have never filled it in. Do you still have the ticket? No, I no longer have it. How many bags do you have? I only have one bag.)

Five answers, five different second halves after ne. French I taught you one of them. Here are the rest, and then the question words that let you be equally precise going the other way.

The negative family, side by side

The last row is the odd one. ne ... que looks like a negative and is a restriction: it does not deny anything, it limits. That has a practical consequence, because the other negatives reduce an article to plain de and this one does not.

Je n'ai pas de frères. I have no brothers. Je n'ai que des frères. I have only brothers. The first turns des into de; the second leaves it alone, because nothing is being denied.

Remember: after a real negative, un, une, des, du and de la all collapse to de. After ne ... que, nothing collapses.

Where the second word goes in a compound tense

This is the part that separates a learner from a reader. In the passé composé some of these words sit between the auxiliary and the participle, and some go after the participle.

The pattern behind it: short adverbs (pas, jamais, plus, rien) hug the auxiliary, while the words that behave like nouns or that introduce something (personne, aucun, ni, que, nulle part) wait until after the participle. Compare the two middle members of the family, which are the pair most often confused: Je n'ai rien vu but Je n'ai vu personne. Same tense, same structure, opposite placement.

rien and personne as subjects

Both can begin a sentence, and when they do, ne still appears before the verb even though nothing follows it.

Rien ne marche. Nothing works. Personne n'est venu. Nobody came. Rien n'a changé. Nothing has changed. Personne ne le sait. Nobody knows.

English drops the second negative and so should you when translating, but French keeps the ne, and leaving it out is one of the errors that marks a text as written by a learner.

Stacking them

Several of these combine, in a fixed order, and the result is idiomatic rather than clumsy.

Je ne veux plus jamais entendre cette chanson. I never want to hear that song again. Il n'y a plus rien dans le frigo. There is nothing left in the fridge. Je n'ai plus rien à dire. I have nothing more to say. On ne voit plus personne ici. You never see anyone here any more.

What you cannot do is combine pas with another negative: je n'ai pas rien vu is not French, because pas and rien are competing for the same slot.

The ne you will hear disappear

In relaxed speech, French speakers routinely drop the ne and keep only the second word. Je sais pas, y a rien, j'ai jamais vu ça, on va plus au cinéma. You will hear this constantly in films and conversation, and you should expect it. Two cautions. It never happens in writing, in exams or in a formal setting, so reproduce it only in dialogue you are reporting. And the dropped ne is precisely what makes a sentence ambiguous for a learner: j'ai plus faim with no ne means I am no longer hungry, not I am hungrier.

quel against lequel

Both mean something like "which", and they belong to different word classes.

All four forms of each sound almost or completely alike, so the spelling is where the work happens: quel livre, quelle page, quels livres, quelles pages, all pronounced identically.

Lequel contracts with à and de exactly as the definite article does, because it contains one.

Auquel de ces deux films penses-tu? Which of these two films are you thinking of? Il y a deux gares: duquel parles-tu? There are two stations; which one are you talking about? Note that laquelle alone does not contract, because la never does.

One more pair worth fixing now, since it is asked constantly: Qu'est-ce qui asks about a subject and qu'est-ce que asks about an object. Qu'est-ce qui s'est passé? What happened? Qu'est-ce que tu as fait? What did you do? The test is the same one you used for the relatives: look at what the clause is missing.

What matters here: quel goes with a noun, lequel stands alone, and lequel swallows à and de into auquel and duquel.

Common misconceptions

• "ne ... que is a negative." It is a restriction meaning only, which is why it leaves des and du untouched: je n'ai que des amis.
• "All the second words sit in the same place in the passé composé." They do not. Je n'ai rien vu but je n'ai vu personne.
• "Because French speakers drop the ne, you can too." In speech, among friends, eventually. In anything written or assessed, the ne is compulsory.
• "You can pile pas on top of another negative." Pas competes with jamais, rien, plus and personne for one slot, so only one of them may appear.
• "quel and lequel are spelling variants of one word." One is an adjective used with a noun, the other a pronoun used instead of one, and only lequel contracts with à and de.

Putting it together

French negates with a frame: ne before the verb, and a second word carrying the meaning. Pas is only one of nine, and the others let you say never, no longer, nothing, nobody, not a single one, neither one nor the other, nowhere and only. All of them except ne ... que reduce a following un, une, des, du or de la to plain de. In compound tenses, pas, jamais, plus and rien slot in between the auxiliary and the participle, while personne, aucun, ni, nulle part and que go after it. Rien and personne can also be subjects, and the ne survives even then. Several stack, in the order plus jamais rien, but pas never joins them. Spoken French drops the ne and written French does not. And for asking which, quel is an adjective that agrees with its noun while lequel is a pronoun that stands alone and contracts with à and de into auquel, duquel, auxquels and desquelles.

Sources

1. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Negation: alternate forms. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
2. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Interrogative pronoun lequel. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu
3. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Généralités sur la négation. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
4. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Le pronom indéfini personne. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca

Start with the number seventy. In Paris it is soixante-dix, sixty-ten. Cross into Belgium or the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and it becomes septante, which is simply what seventy ought to have been all along. Ninety follows the same logic: quatre-vingt-dix in France, nonante in Belgium and Switzerland. Eighty splits the two: Belgians say quatre-vingts like the French and never say huitante, while huitante is heard in the Swiss cantons of Vaud, Valais and Fribourg.

Septante and nonante are not deviations invented by the periphery. They were ordinary French until the newer forms took over in France in about the sixteenth century. The French you have been learning is the French of one country, and this lesson follows a few ordinary words out of it.

Quebec: a language with a law behind it

French in Quebec is the only French in the Americas with a statute defending it. The Charter of the French Language, passed in 1977 and known as la loi 101, makes French the official language of the provincial government, and the Office québécois de la langue française is the body that publishes guidance on usage. Several of the sources cited in this course come from it.

One consequence you can hear: Quebec coins French words where France imports English ones.

The Office québécois de la langue française records that magasiner has been general in Quebec French since the early 1900s in the sense of doing one's shopping in shops, and treats the borrowing faire du shopping as not recommended in Quebec even though it is widespread in European French. That is a good example of what a language authority actually does: not inventing words, but recording which of the existing ones it recommends.

Two meal words shift as well. In Quebec, Belgium and Switzerland, the three meals are often déjeuner (breakfast), dîner (midday) and souper (evening), while in France they are petit-déjeuner, déjeuner and dîner. If you are invited to souper at seven, do not arrive at midnight.

Belgium and Switzerland: the same language, a few different handles

Belgian French and Swiss French differ from the French of France mainly in vocabulary and a few numbers, not in grammar. Everything you have learned in this course works in Liège and in Lausanne without adjustment.

Practise the numbers, because they change arithmetic you thought was settled. 77 is soixante-dix-sept in France and septante-sept in Belgium. 95 is quatre-vingt-quinze in France and nonante-cinq in Belgium. 85 is quatre-vingt-cinq in both France and Belgium, but huitante-cinq in Lausanne.

Worth holding on to: the grammar does not move across these borders. What moves is a short list of words and three numbers.

Senegal: French as an official language among many spoken ones

In Senegal, French is the official language, inherited from the colonial period, and it is the language of government, law and secondary education. It is also, according to the summary of the national picture, understood by only a small minority of the population. Over thirty languages are spoken in the country, and Wolof is the most widespread, spoken by about 80 percent of the population as a first or second language and serving as the everyday lingua franca alongside French.

Two things follow for a learner. First, official status and daily use are different measures, and a map that colours Senegal as francophone is telling you about the first, not the second. Second, French in Senegal has its own vocabulary and its own literature; the poet and first president of the republic, Léopold Sédar Senghor, wrote in French, and Senegalese writers continue to.

Morocco: widely used, not official

Morocco is the reverse case. The official languages of Morocco are Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Moroccan Amazigh. French is not official at all. It is nevertheless used across business, higher education, science and administration, and according to the figures reported for the country it is spoken by roughly a third of Moroccans as a second language. Moroccan Arabic, known as Darija, is the ordinary spoken vernacular.

So the word francophone covers at least three different situations: a place where French is the majority home language with a law protecting it (Quebec), a place where it is the official language of a state whose population mostly speaks something else (Senegal), and a place where it has no legal status at all but is used daily by millions (Morocco). The intergovernmental body that links French-speaking states and governments is the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, whose membership includes states in all three categories.

What this means for you, practically

1. Your grammar travels. The passé composé, the subjunctive, the pronoun order chart: none of it changes anywhere in the French-speaking world.
2. Your numbers may not. Learn to hear septante and nonante even if you never say them, or you will mishear prices and phone numbers.
3. Accent is not error. A Quebec, Ivorian, Swiss or Senegalese accent is a variety of French, not a failed attempt at the Parisian one. Nobody speaks accentless French, including Parisians.
4. Vocabulary is local and recorded. When you are unsure whether a word is used in a given place, a language authority such as the Office québécois de la langue française will often tell you in writing.

The core of it: French is a language with several centres, not one centre and a set of deviations, and knowing that changes how you listen.

Common misconceptions

• "Quebec French is old French, frozen since 1700." It has changed continuously, and it also coins new words faster than France in some areas, courriel being the obvious example.
• "Septante and nonante are mistakes." They are older than the French forms that replaced them, and they are standard usage in two countries.
• "Belgians say huitante." They say quatre-vingts. Huitante belongs to Vaud, Valais and Fribourg in Switzerland.
• "If a country is francophone, everyone there speaks French at home." In Senegal, French is the official language but Wolof is the everyday lingua franca. Official status and daily use are separate facts.
• "French is an official language of Morocco." It is not. Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Moroccan Amazigh are, although French is widely used.

What to remember

Seventy, eighty and ninety are the clearest marker of where a French speaker learned to count: soixante-dix, quatre-vingts and quatre-vingt-dix in France, septante and nonante in Belgium and Switzerland, and huitante in Vaud, Valais and Fribourg. Quebec French has a law behind it, the Charter of the French Language of 1977, and a body that publishes guidance on usage, which is why courriel and magasiner are recorded recommendations rather than slang. Belgian and Swiss French differ from the French of France in vocabulary and numbers, not in grammar. In Senegal French is the official language while Wolof is the lingua franca of daily life, spoken by about 80 percent of the population. In Morocco French has no official status, the official languages being Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Moroccan Amazigh, yet it is used daily in business and higher education by roughly a third of the population. Everything you have learned works in all of these places; only the local words change.

Sources

1. Office québécois de la langue française. (2024). Emploi et sens de magasiner et de magasinage. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Belgian French: septante, nonante and the absence of huitante. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Swiss French: septante, huitante in Vaud, Valais and Fribourg, and natel. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Languages of Morocco: Modern Standard Arabic and Standard Moroccan Amazigh as official languages. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). Charter of the French Language: the 1977 Quebec statute known as Bill 101. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Two lines of French from 1668, which most French adults can still recite from memory: Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché, / Tenait en son bec un fromage. Master Crow, perched on a tree, held a cheese in his beak.

You know every grammatical feature in those two lines. Perché is a past participle used as an adjective. Tenait is an imparfait, setting the scene exactly as Lesson 1 said it would. En son bec is an old-fashioned way of writing dans son bec. The only obstacle is vocabulary, and this lesson supplies it. We will walk the whole fable end to end, then do the same with an eighteen-line poem where the difficulty is of a different kind.

The fable, line by line

This is Jean de La Fontaine, Le Corbeau et le Renard, the second fable of Book I of the Fables, first published in 1668. The text below follows the 1874 Bernardin-Bechet edition on Wikisource, with the printer's curved apostrophes written as plain ones.

Now read it straight through in English: Master Crow, perched on a tree, was holding a cheese in his beak. Master Fox, drawn by the smell, spoke to him roughly as follows. Well now, good day, my lord Crow. How handsome you are, how fine you look. Truly, if your song matches your feathers, you are the phoenix of these woods. At these words the crow is beside himself with joy, and to show off his lovely voice he opens a wide beak and drops his prey. The fox grabs it and says: my good sir, learn that every flatterer lives at the expense of whoever listens to him. This lesson is surely worth a cheese. The crow, ashamed and embarrassed, swore, a little late, that he would not be caught that way again.

Three grammatical things the last line does

Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus. This one line uses three structures from this course.

1. The conditional in reported speech. The crow's actual thought was on ne m'y prendra plus, with a future. Because the reporting verb jura is in the past, the future shifts down to the conditional, exactly as Lesson 2 described for the plus-que-parfait. A future inside a past report becomes a conditional.
2. Two pronouns in order. l'y is le plus y, in the chart order of Lesson 7: column 2 before column 4.
3. ne ... plus. The negative of Lesson 15, wrapping the verb with the pronouns tucked inside: ne l'y prendrait plus.

Why this matters: a text from 1668 is not a different language. It is the language you have been studying, with a handful of old-fashioned turns and one tense you have not been taught to write.

The tense you will only ever read: the passé simple

Tint and jura are passé simple, the written narrative past. It is not used in conversation anywhere in the French-speaking world, and you will never be asked to produce it. You do need to recognise it, because every novel, fairy tale and history book written before about 1950 uses it where speech would use the passé composé.

The recognisable shapes are -a and -èrent for -er verbs, -it and -irent for most others, and a short group of one-syllable oddities: fut, eut, fit, vint, tint, prit, dit, mit, vit. When you meet one, translate it as a plain English past and move on.

The poem, and a different kind of difficulty

Paul Verlaine published Chanson d'automne in Poèmes saturniens in 1866. Every word in it is ordinary. The difficulty is that the lines are four syllables long, so the sense runs across them and you cannot read line by line.

Read the first stanza as one sentence and it resolves: Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne blessent mon coeur d'une langueur monotone. Subject, three pieces of description hanging off it, verb, and a phrase with de meaning "with". Nothing in it is beyond you. The line breaks are doing the work of slowing you down.

Four pieces of grammar you already own. Se souvenir de governs de, which is why it is je me souviens des jours anciens, with de plus les contracted to des. S'en aller is a pronominal verb with en baked in, meaning to go away, and its imperative is the va-t'en you met in Lesson 7. Qui m'emporte is the relative pronoun of Lesson 14, subject of emporte. And pareil à takes à, not de.

On saying it: the four-syllable line means that the mute e at the end of a word is often counted. Monotone is three syllables here and l'automne is two, but in the phrase Sonne l'heure the final e of sonne is elided before the vowel. That is why French verse of this period sounds slower than French speech: syllables that a Parisian would swallow are pronounced.

In short: with a fable the obstacle is vocabulary and one unfamiliar tense; with a lyric poem the obstacle is syntax stretched across short lines.

Common misconceptions

• "Old texts are written in a different language." The fable is 1668 and its grammar is the grammar in this course. Only en son bec for dans son bec and the passé simple mark the date.
• "You must understand every word before you understand the text." You can follow Le Corbeau et le Renard without knowing what a ramage is, because the fox says plumage in the next line and the parallel gives it away.
• "The passé simple is the same as the imparfait." It is the written equivalent of the passé composé, not of the imparfait. Il jura is a single bounded act.
• "Poetry uses a special vocabulary." Chanson d'automne contains one slightly literary word, langueur. The rest is ordinary French arranged unusually.
• "Mute e is always silent." In verse of this period it is usually counted as a syllable unless the next word begins with a vowel.

Pulling it together

You have read two complete public-domain French texts in the original. The fable gave you a narrative in verse from 1668: mock titles, a flatterer, a lost cheese, and a last line that packs a reported conditional, two object pronouns in chart order and a ne ... plus into twelve words. It also gave you the passé simple, the written narrative past that you will read for the rest of your life and never have to write, recognisable by the endings -a, -èrent, -it and -irent and by a short list of one-syllable forms including fut, eut, fit and vint. The poem gave you a different exercise: ordinary vocabulary broken into four-syllable lines so that the syntax runs across them, plus se souvenir de, s'en aller, a relative qui and the counted mute e that makes French verse sound slower than French speech. Both texts are freely readable online, and both are within reach of the grammar you now have.

Sources

1. La Fontaine, J. de. (1874). Le Corbeau et le Renard. In Fables, Livre I, fable 2 (pp. 30-31). Bernardin-Bechet. Digitised text. fr.wikisource.org
2. Verlaine, P. (1866). Chanson d'automne. In Poèmes saturniens (pp. 57-58). Alphonse Lemerre. Digitised text. fr.wikisource.org
3. La Fontaine, J. de. Fables de La Fontaine, Tome Premier. Project Gutenberg ebook 17941. gutenberg.org
4. Kelton, K., Guilloteau, N., and Blyth, C. (2024). Passé simple. In Tex's French Grammar. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin. laits.utexas.edu

Two first sentences, both from nineteenth century French prose, both about a single person.

Maupassant, 1885: C'était une de ces jolies et charmantes filles, nées, comme par une erreur du destin, dans une famille d'employés.

(She was one of those pretty, charming girls, born, as though by a mistake of fate, into a family of clerks.)

Hugo, first published 1862: En 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel était évêque de Digne.

(In 1815, Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was bishop of Digne.)

Maupassant gives you no name, no date and no place. Hugo gives you a year, a full name with three forenames, an office and a town. Both are famous openings, and comparing what they choose to withhold is the point of this lesson. On the way you will see nearly every structure from this course sitting in real prose.

The Maupassant paragraph in full

This is the opening of La Parure by Guy de Maupassant, from the 1885 Flammarion edition of Contes du jour et de la nuit.

C'était une de ces jolies et charmantes filles, nées, comme par une erreur du destin, dans une famille d'employés. Elle n'avait pas de dot, pas d'espérances, aucun moyen d'être connue, comprise, aimée, épousée par un homme riche et distingué ; et elle se laissa marier avec un petit commis du ministère de l'instruction publique.

(She was one of those pretty, charming girls, born, as though by a mistake of fate, into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no way of being known, understood, loved or married by a rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married off to a minor clerk at the ministry of education.)

Read the negations again: pas de dot, pas d'espérances, aucun moyen. Three refusals in one sentence. Maupassant is building a character entirely out of absences, and the grammar that lets him do it is the article reduction you drilled in Lesson 15. In English you would have to write "no" three times and it would sound like a list; in French the de does the work quietly.

Two sentences later comes the piece of grammar this course has been building towards:

Toutes ces choses, dont une autre femme de sa caste ne se serait même pas aperçue, la torturaient et l'indignaient.

(All these things, which another woman of her class would not even have noticed, tortured and outraged her.)

Take it apart. dont is there because the verb is s'apercevoir de, to notice, which governs de, exactly as Lesson 14 said. ne se serait pas aperçue is a past conditional of a pronominal verb, with the participle agreeing with une autre femme. la and l' are direct object pronouns standing in front of their verbs. One sentence, four things from four different lessons, and it is an ordinary sentence in an ordinary short story.

The Hugo paragraph in full

This is the opening of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, in the 1890 Testard edition, which keeps the older spelling siége for what is now written siège.

En 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel était évêque de Digne. C'était un vieillard d'environ soixante-quinze ans ; il occupait le siége de Digne depuis 1806.

(In 1815, Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was bishop of Digne. He was an old man of about seventy-five; he had held the see of Digne since 1806.)

That last row is worth a paragraph. French uses depuis with a present to mean "have been doing", and with an imparfait to mean "had been doing". J'habite ici depuis trois ans. I have been living here for three years. J'habitais là depuis trois ans quand il est arrivé. I had been living there for three years when he arrived. The tense is one step less far back than English expects, and that mismatch is one of the last things learners fix.

The next sentences show the plus-que-parfait doing precisely the job Lesson 2 described.

Il n'est peut-être pas inutile d'indiquer ici les bruits et les propos qui avaient couru sur son compte au moment où il était arrivé dans le diocèse.

(It is perhaps not useless to set down here the rumours and the talk that had gone about concerning him at the time when he had arrived in the diocese.)

qui avaient couru is a relative with a plus-que-parfait, because the rumours came before the moment being described. au moment où is the où of time from Lesson 14, not quand. il était arrivé is another plus-que-parfait, and arriver takes être. Then, a paragraph later, La révolution survint, a bare passé simple, and the narrative starts to move exactly as Lesson 1 predicted it would.

The comparison

Neither is better. They are two solutions to the same problem, and the grammar follows the choice: Maupassant needs negation and the partitive, Hugo needs dates, the plus-que-parfait and relative clauses. When you read French prose, asking which of these two strategies an opening uses will tell you a great deal within four lines.

The point: the tense a writer chooses is not decoration. It is how the reader is told what to hold in mind and what to put in the background.

A word about what you may and may not reproduce

Everything quoted in this lesson and the last is in the public domain: La Fontaine died in 1695, Hugo in 1885, Maupassant in 1893, Verlaine in 1896. Their texts can be printed in full, which is why Wikisource and Project Gutenberg carry them.

Twentieth century French is different. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince, published in 1943 and the book most often recommended to learners at your level, remains under copyright in the United States, so this course describes it rather than reprinting it. It is the story of a pilot stranded in the desert who meets a boy from a small asteroid; the French is genuinely simple, the vocabulary narrow, and the dialogue full of the tenses you have been learning. Its single most quoted line, spoken by the fox, is a perfect example of the restriction from Lesson 15: On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur (Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, 1943), one sees clearly only with the heart, where ne ... que means only and denies nothing. Buy or borrow the book; do not expect to find the whole text free online, and be suspicious of sites that offer it.

Common misconceptions

• "Nineteenth century prose needs a special vocabulary." The hardest words in these two passages are dot (dowry), commis (clerk) and évêque (bishop). The grammar is entirely familiar.
• "depuis takes a past tense, as in English." It takes a present for something still going on and an imparfait for something still going on at a past moment.
• "If a book is famous, it must be free online." Fame has nothing to do with it. The date of the author's death and the law of the country you are in do.
• "A long French sentence means the writer is showing off." Maupassant's long sentence is one list of absences; taking it apart is easier than it looks, because the structures repeat.
• "You should look up every unknown word before reading on." Read the paragraph twice first. Most of the unknown words in these two passages are decided by the sentence around them.

Summing up

Two openings, two strategies. Maupassant defines a woman by what she does not have, and the grammar that carries it is negation with article reduction, aucun, participles agreeing across a list, and one sentence in which dont, a past conditional of a pronominal verb and two object pronouns all appear at once. Hugo defines a man by a year, a name, an office and the rumours attached to him, and his grammar is the imparfait for the standing state, depuis with an imparfait for a state that had been going on, the plus-que-parfait for what came earlier, au moment où for time, and the passé simple when the story starts. Everything in both passages is grammar you now control. And the reason you can read them in full is that both authors died in the nineteenth century, which is also why a 1943 book such as Le Petit Prince appears here as a description with a single quoted line rather than as a text.

Sources

1. Maupassant, G. de. (1885). La Parure. In Contes du jour et de la nuit (pp. 73-93). C. Marpon et E. Flammarion. Digitised text. fr.wikisource.org
2. Hugo, V. (1890). Monsieur Myriel. In Les Misérables, Tome I: Fantine (pp. 7-12). Émile Testard. Digitised text of the opening chapter, first published 1862. fr.wikisource.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2025). The Little Prince: publication in 1943 and its copyright status in the United States. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Saint-Exupéry, A. de. (1943). Le Petit Prince. Reynal and Hitchcock. In copyright in the United States; described here and quoted only in a single line.

Here is the task. Your exchange partner's mother has written to say that the family can host you from 12 to 19 July, and she has asked three things: what happened to your ankle, whether those dates suit you, and what you are like, since her younger son will be sharing his room with you. You have to answer in French, by Sunday, in about 150 words.

That single email contains all three of the text types anyone writes at A2 level: a short narrative in the past, a piece of practical correspondence, and a description. This lesson builds each one from a model, and ends with the checklist you should run over anything you write in French from now on.

Text one: a narrative in the past

The engine is Lesson 1. Sort the verbs into how things stood and what happened, then write the first group in the imparfait and the second in the passé composé, reaching back with the plus-que-parfait where the order of the telling is not the order of events.

Model (98 words). C'était samedi dernier, vers cinq heures. Il faisait chaud et je jouais au foot avec mes cousins dans le jardin. Le terrain était sec et dur parce qu'il n'avait pas plu depuis trois semaines. Tout à coup, je suis tombé et je me suis tordu la cheville. Au début, je n'avais pas très mal, mais dix minutes plus tard, je ne pouvais plus marcher. Mon oncle m'a emmené aux urgences. On m'a fait une radio: ce n'était pas cassé, c'était une entorse. Le médecin m'a donné une ordonnance et m'a dit de me reposer une semaine.

(It was last Saturday, about five o'clock. It was hot and I was playing football with my cousins in the garden. The ground was dry and hard because it had not rained for three weeks. Suddenly I fell and twisted my ankle. At first it did not hurt much, but ten minutes later I could no longer walk. My uncle took me to A and E. They did an X-ray: it was not broken, it was a sprain. The doctor gave me a prescription and told me to rest for a week.)

Two habits make a narrative read as French rather than as translated English. Start with at least two sentences of scene before anything happens. And mark the switch with a time expression: tout à coup, soudain, ce jour-là, un jour, et puis.

Text two: a personal email

French correspondence is more formulaic than English, and the formulas are worth learning as fixed blocks. The choice depends entirely on who you are writing to.

The Office québécois de la langue française notes that closing formulas in an email are generally simpler than in a letter, and that short ones such as Meilleures salutations and Salutations distinguées are normally followed by a comma. Its guidance on letters and emails was revised in 2022, which is a useful reminder that these conventions do move.

Model (112 words).

Bonjour Madame,

Merci beaucoup pour votre message et pour votre invitation. Les dates du 12 au 19 juillet me conviennent très bien. Ma mère est d'accord et nous allons réserver le billet de train cette semaine.

Pour ma cheville, ne vous inquiétez pas: je me suis fait une entorse au foot il y a quinze jours, mais ça va beaucoup mieux. Le médecin a dit que je pourrais marcher normalement en juillet.

Si vous avez besoin d'autres informations, dites-le-moi. Je vous enverrai l'heure d'arrivée dès que j'aurai le billet.

Merci encore, et à bientôt.

Cordialement,
Sam

(Hello Mrs Renard. Thank you very much for your message and for your invitation. The dates from 12 to 19 July suit me very well. My mother agrees and we are going to book the train ticket this week. About my ankle, do not worry: I sprained it playing football a fortnight ago, but it is much better. The doctor said I would be able to walk normally in July. If you need any other information, tell me. I will send you the arrival time as soon as I have the ticket. Thanks again, and see you soon. Best wishes, Sam.)

Look at what the second half is doing. Le médecin a dit que je pourrais marcher is a future shifted into a conditional inside a past report. Dites-le-moi is an affirmative imperative with two pronouns behind the verb in chart order. Dès que j'aurai le billet is a future after dès que where English uses a present. Three structures from three different lessons, in three consecutive sentences, and none of them is showing off: this is simply what an ordinary email needs.

Remember: in French correspondence, the opening and closing formulas are not decoration. Getting them wrong is the clearest signal of a learner, and getting them right costs nothing because they are fixed.

Text three: a description

A description is the imparfait or the present, adjectives that agree, and enough concrete detail to be worth reading. Aim for three things nobody could guess.

Model (86 words). Je suis assez grand, brun, et je porte des lunettes. Je suis plutôt calme, mais je parle beaucoup quand je connais les gens. J'aime la musique, surtout la guitare, et je joue dans un petit groupe avec deux amis. Je me lève tard le week-end, ce qui est mon seul vrai défaut. Je ne fume pas et je ne suis pas difficile pour la nourriture: je mange de tout, sauf les olives. Si votre fils aime le foot, nous nous entendrons très bien.

(I am fairly tall, dark-haired, and I wear glasses. I am rather quiet, but I talk a lot once I know people. I like music, especially the guitar, and I play in a small band with two friends. I get up late at weekends, which is my only real fault. I do not smoke and I am not fussy about food: I eat everything except olives. If your son likes football, we will get on very well.)

Three structures worth copying. ce qui est mon seul vrai défaut uses the ce qui of Lesson 14 to comment on the whole preceding clause. Je ne suis pas difficile pour la nourriture is how French says fussy. And the last sentence is a System 1 si clause, present plus future, from Lesson 10.

The connectors that hold any of the three together

The checklist: nine things to look for before you send anything

1. Auxiliary. Every compound verb: is it avoir or être? All pronominal verbs take être.
2. Agreement. With être, agree with the subject. With avoir, agree only with a direct object standing before the verb.
3. Pronoun position. Before the verb, before the infinitive, before the auxiliary, inside ne and pas, and only behind the verb in an affirmative imperative.
4. After si. Present or imparfait, never a form in -rai or -rais.
5. After quand and dès que. A future, when the sentence is about the future.
6. After il faut que and vouloir que. A subjunctive, and check whether the subject actually changes, since an infinitive may be enough.
7. Negation. Both halves present, ne included, and the article reduced to de after a true negative.
8. Accents. Read the text once looking only at accents: é, è, ê, à, ç, ô, î, ù. A missing accent is a spelling error in French, not a typographic nicety.
9. Formulas. Right opening and closing for the relationship, and tu or vous kept consistent from the first line to the last.

Point nine is the one that fails most often in practice. Starting an email with Bonjour Madame and slipping into tu in the third paragraph is more jarring to a French reader than a wrong participle.

What all this adds up to is roughly the writing described at level A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which expects a learner to produce short, simple connected texts on familiar matters, write personal letters and notes, and describe experiences and events in a straightforward way. That is precisely the ground these three models cover.

Common misconceptions

• "Formulas are old-fashioned and can be skipped." A French email without an opening or closing formula reads as curt, and in a formal context as rude.
• "Longer sentences show better French." A correct short sentence beats a long one with a broken si clause. Connectors, not subordination, are what make writing flow at this level.
• "Accents are optional in informal writing." They change meaning: ou is or and où is where; a is has and à is to.
• "You should write in French the way you speak." Not yet. Written French keeps the ne, keeps the formulas, and keeps the agreements that speech hides.
• "A description should list adjectives." Three concrete details beat ten adjectives. Olives and a guitar tell a reader more than sympathique and intéressant.

What you now know

You can write the three things a French course at this level is for. A narrative built on Lesson 1's two columns, opening with scene in the imparfait, switching on a time marker, and reaching behind itself with the plus-que-parfait when the telling runs out of order. An email whose opening and closing formulas match the relationship, and whose middle carries the reported conditional, the imperative with pronouns attached, and the future after dès que. And a description built from concrete detail rather than adjectives, using ce qui to comment on a whole clause and a si clause to make an offer. The nine-point checklist is the part to keep: auxiliary, agreement, pronoun position, si, quand, subjunctive, negation, accents, and consistency of register. Run it over everything you write, and most of what separates your French from correct French will be gone.

Sources

1. Office québécois de la langue française. (2022, updated 2024). Formules de salutation dans le courriel. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
2. Office québécois de la langue française. (2022, updated 2024). Formules d'appel dans le courriel. Banque de dépannage linguistique, Vitrine linguistique. vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca
3. TV5MONDE. Apprendre le français: graded writing and comprehension activities by level. TV5MONDE. apprendre.tv5monde.com
4. Council of Europe. (2020). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Companion volume, written production and written interaction scales at level A2. Council of Europe Publishing, Strasbourg. Print and official PDF edition; the publisher's site blocks automated checks, so it is cited here in full rather than linked.