French Grammar For Dummies
Overview
The easy way to master French grammar
French Grammar For Dummies is a logical extension and complement to the successful language learning book, French For Dummies. In plain English, it teaches you the grammatical rules of the French language, including parts of speech, sentence construction, pronouns, adjectives, punctuation, stress and verb tenses, and moods. Throughout the book, you get plenty of practice opportunities to help you on your goal of mastering basic French grammar and usage.
- Grasp the grammatical rules of French including parts of speech, sentence construction, and verb tenses
- Enhance your descriptive speech with adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions
- Benefit from plenty of practice opportunities throughout the book
- Use the French language confidently and correctly
Whether you're a student studying French or a professional looking to get ahead of the pack by learning a second language, French Grammar For Dummies is your hands-on guide to quickly and painlessly master the written aspect of this popular language.
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About The Author
Véronique Mazet has a doctorate in French from the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of two successful grammar books. She currently teaches French at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas.
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french grammar for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
French grammar is all about using French words in the correct way so people can understand your meaning. You can learn a lot of French words by browsing an English-French dictionary, but to make sense, you need to know the rules of French grammar.Some of the basics include making nouns plural, adding description by pairing adjectives correctly to nouns, and using pronominal verbs to talk about actions done to you or someone else.
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In French, you need two negative words, ne (no) and pas (not), to make a sentence negative. Pas can be replaced by other negative words, such as jamais (never), personne (no one), and rien (nothing). Here’s what else you need to know in order to make a French sentence negative:
The two negative words are placed around (before and after) the conjugated verb, like this: Tu ne joues pas.
In English, the conditional allows you to express a daydream, a wish, or a hypothetical situation, such as I would go to Hawaii tomorrow if I could. In French, the conditional is used in the same way but its conjugation is quite different.
To form the conditional of regular -er and -ir verbs, follow these steps:
Start from the complete infinitive, without dropping any part of it.
The word possession implies an owner and an object owned. French takes everything into consideration: who the owner is (yourself, him, them), like in English, and also the gender and number of the object owned.
In English, the possessive is only concerned with the owner. You say his books and his car. His reflects only the he is the owner, not the books (which are masculine, plural) or the car (which is feminine, singular).
French uses accents on certain vowels for various reasons, and emphasis has nothing to do with it. An accent can change the sound of a vowel or help distinguish between two different words that would otherwise be spelled the same, like sur (on) and sûr (certain).
The cedilla is a funny-looking mark that always changes the sound of the letter c it gets attached to, from a k sound to a soft sound like the s in sea.
French adverbs can be sorted into three categories, based on which question they answer: when, where, and how much. You’ve encountered these very common words before, and you will find more here! There, in just one sentence are three adverbs! Very (très) is an adverb of quantity, before (avant) is an adverb of time, and here (ici) is an adverb of place.
A sure way to know the gender of a noun is to look at its article — when it’s available, of course! Like English, French has definite articles, indefinite articles, and partitive articles. The French definite article is the equivalent of the. But French has four forms of article défini.
French Definite Articles
French Article
Usage in French
Example
le
Before masculine singular nouns
le matin (the morning)
la
Before feminine singular nouns
la vie (life)
l’
Before masculine or feminine singular nouns beginning with a
vowel or a mute -h
l’amour (love)
les
Before masculine or feminine plural nouns
les bonbons (candies)
Le and les disappear completely when they are preceded by the prepositions à (at) and de (of/from).
French
The French pronoun en replaces phrases that indicate quantities (of things or people). Quantities can be expressed with numbers, expressions, indefinite articles, and partitive articles:
A number: J’ai trois chats. (I have three cats.)
An expression + de: Il a beaucoup de CDs. (He has a lot of CDs.)
An indefinite article: Nous avons une voiture bleue.
French grammar is all about using French words in the correct way so people can understand your meaning. You can learn a lot of French words by browsing an English-French dictionary, but to make sense, you need to know the rules of French grammar.Some of the basics include making nouns plural, adding description by pairing adjectives correctly to nouns, and using pronominal verbs to talk about actions done to you or someone else.
The French indefinite article is the equivalent to a/an and some (but English often skips it). Do you ask about one thing, describe a couple of things that happened, and make plans for an outing that hasn’t yet been defined? If so, you’re an indefinite article kind of person, like the French! And as such, you should treat the article indéfini as the default article in French grammar.
To grasp the fundamentals of any language, your native language as well as French, you need to recognize the parts of speech, the various types of words that compose a language and how they work.
French nouns
You should know three essential things about a French nom (noun):
It refers to people, places, things, or concepts.
A gerund in English is easily recognizable by its -ing form. A French gerund is also easily recognizable: it’s an -ant verb form. This form by itself is called the present participle; adding the preposition en (which translates as by, in, or while) in front of it forms le gérondif.
The -ing form is very common in English, but often it doesn’t have a direct translation in French.
Questions often start with Do you . . . in English, and short answers often use that very same helper verb: I do or I don’t. French doesn’t use an auxiliary to ask a question, so there’s no such thing as I do either. For a short answer in French, your only options are oui (yes) and non (no). But you can add a few frills to that, like bien sûr (of course), or pas du tout (not at all).
The French equivalents of who are qui, qui est-ce qui, and qui est-ce que. The choice between the forms depends on whether qui is the subject or object of the verb.
“Who” as the subject of a French verb
In Qui est là? (Who’s there?), qui functions as the subject of the verb. Using qui this way is the most common and easiest way of asking who.
French
The difference between asking Qu’est-ce que tu veux? (What do you want?) in French and Qu’est-ce qui est arrivé? (What happened?) is a matter of whether the interrogative what is the object of the verb or the subject of the verb.
Qu’est-ce que asks what when what is the object of the verb — that is, when it receives the action.
French
Sometimes you need to know how to say more than a simple yes or no in French; you may want to know when or where something happened and who came and what they did. In this case, you need to use an information question, and like in English, French information questions start with a question word (technically known as interrogative adverbs and adjectives).
Quantities describe how much of a thing there is or how much a person does. Making comparisons of quantities in French in a bit different from comparing quantities in English.
Compare quantities of an item in French
The comparative of a quantity looks a little different from its fellow comparatives in French — specifically, it uses de (of).
The French verbs pouvoir (can/to be able to), vouloir (to want), and devoir (must/to have to) are important because they function as helper verbs in combination with another verb. In that case, the helper verb is conjugated but the other verb is in the infinitive. Here are some examples:
La police veut parler avec le suspect.
Many verbs have an -ir ending, but not all of them play nice! Some verbs don’t follow the regular conjugating patterns. They are irregular, and many of them actually don’t follow much of a pattern at all!
How to conjugate short French -ir verbs
About 30 -ir verbs don’t follow the regular -ir conjugation pattern of finir.
To simplify things, French has classified regular verbs into three types, based on the ending of their infinitives. Think of all the things you can possibly do in one day. That’s also a lot of French verbs to conjugate.
The largest group is the verbs with infinitives that end in -er (the -er verbs), like parler (to speak).
French
With so many French verbs being -er verbs, you can imagine that they don’t all follow the pattern with the same level of obedience. The good news is that they all mostly follow the conjugation pattern of a regular -er verb: They drop the -er of the infinitive to get the stem, and they have the same present tense endings.
French
The meanings of the French verbs lire (to read), dire (to say/tell), and conduire (to drive) have nothing in common. However, they have a similar irregularity, so if you group them together, you may have more luck remembering them. This is how you form their present tense:
Drop the -re of the infinitive to get the stem.
French
The French verbs prendre (to take), apprendre (to learn), and comprendre (to understand) may come in handy to you. How can you say that you don’t understand if you can’t conjugate comprendre? Both apprendre and comprendre are derived from prendre and have the same irregular pattern of conjugation.
Here’s how you conjugate prendre in present, and by extension the same way you conjugate apprendre and comprendre.
French
The French verbs voir (to see) and croire (to believe) are alone in their group of irregular verbs, although the particularity of their conjugation makes them somewhat akin to regular but moody -yer verbs. Like those verbs, they have regular endings, but their stem has a little twist: they replace the -i with a -y in the nous and vous forms.
French
Two common French verbs: écrire (to write) and mettre (to put) misbehave very much like the irregular verbs lire, dire, and conduire, but for one small difference that sets them in a different group.
Proceed like this to conjugate écrire in present tense:
Drop the -re of the infinitive to find the stem.
Add the ending for the correct subject: -s, -s, and -t for the singular and -vons, -vez, and -vent for the plural.
French
In French and in English, the verbs être (to be), avoir (to have), aller (to go), and faire (to do) are probably the most used verbs of our repertoire, which is also why they have become so twisted. Like your favorite sneakers, the more you use them, the more worn out and deformed they become! But you can’t do without them.
The French gerund is used with the preposition en. It is equivalent to the English while + -ing, as in while eating (en mangeant); upon + -ing, as in upon arriving (en arrivant); and by + -ing, as in by exercising (en faisant de la gym).
But you have to keep one important thing in mind: The action expressed by the gerund is performed by the same subject as the conjugated verb.
French
To describe an action in superlative terms, French uses le plus or le moins followed by an adverb. (In superlatives with adverbs, the article is always le.) Easy enough right? Here’s how to make the superlative using an adverb:
For a superlative of superiority: subject + verb + le plus + adverb
For the best (the most well): subject + verb + le mieux
The best in French has an irregular form, like English.
If you’d like a little bit of sugar in your coffee, obviously you can’t use French numbers. Expressions of quantity in French (including those related to food) are just what you need.
How to use specific French expressions of quantities
You use an expression of quantity to express a quantity that’s less specific than a number and yet a bit more specific than a partitive article like du (some).
French
French exclamatory expressions often use interrogative words, like quel (what + noun), que (how + adjective), and quoi (what), as well as other expressions like comme (which literally means as but translates to how for exclamations).
Do you sometimes get excited to the point that you need to burst into an exclamation?
As you discuss days, months, and specific dates in French, you’re going to need tell time (l’heure) and probably with both the 12-hour and 24-hour clocks.
How to express French time via the 12-hour clock
Time is typically expressed based on a 12-hour clock. In French, you say the hour then the minutes, and it’s a little different from the way it’s done in English.
Most French adverbs of manner are derived from an adjective. For example, lent (slow) gives the adverb lentement (slowly). To form an adverb of manner, take the feminine singular form of the adjective (built from the masculine singular form) and add -ment to it. You follow this rule even for adjectives that have an irrregular feminine form, like mou (limp), attentif (attentive), sot (silly), and doux (soft).
Some French adjectives have irregular feminine singular endings. To form the feminine singular form, some masculine singular adjectives require a little more than just adding -e. Here, the irregular feminine adjectives are in nine categories based on verb ending so they’re easier for you to spot.
Ending in vowel + consonant: For adjectives that end in a vowel + consonant, you form the FS adjective by doubling that consonant before adding the -e of the feminine singular.
Some French adverbs of manner take a route that’s different from the usual one, and some adverbs of manner are completely irregular. Sometimes, an adverb of manner is not formed directly from the feminine of the adjective. Adjectives that end in -e in the feminine fall into this group. The -e changes to -é before adding the -ment ending of the adverb.
To create a French gerund, you need the present participle. Forming the present participle is easy for most verbs, regular and irregular. Take the nous form of the present tense, drop the -ons ending, and replace it with -ant. Do not keep the subject pronoun nous. You’re done!
The table shows how some common verbs form their present participle.
French
In French, you can ask a question in a couple of different ways. In English, when you ask a yes/no question in present tense, you typically begin with Do you, and the verb follows. (For example, Do you have a cat?) French has two primary ways of asking the same question:
Add est-ce que at the beginning of a sentence.
French
Using inversion to ask a question in French requires a little tweaking in the order of the words of the statement. The subject pronoun and the verb get swapped around (inverted) and separated by a hyphen.
Here is a list of the subject pronouns you can use in inversion. Note how je (I) is not among them! You pretty much never invert je and the verb (unless you’re a writer of melodramas in the 19th century).
French
In French, the preposition must come at the very beginning of the question, before qui if it’s a who question and before quoi if it’s a what question. With questions such as Who did you say that to? and What did you do it for?, to and for are prepositions.
In English, people understand your meaning if you put the preposition at the end (even though your English teacher may have taught you that it’s improper).
Sometimes, an English she does not translate to elle in French. For example, to say She is my friend, you’d say c’est mon amie. What happened to she?
How to use c’est and ce sont
If someone asks you, “Who is that woman?”, you’d probably answer with “She’s . . .”. To answer this type of question, French uses c’est in singular (masculine and feminine) and ce sont in plural instead of il/elle est and ils/elles sont.
When you start a comparison in French, you can say that someone is more or less of a quality, using être (to be) and an adjective. When you describe something as more beautiful, or as big, or less expensive than another thing, you’re comparing qualities. The words beautiful, big, and expensive are adjectives that express the quality.
French adverbs fit into comparisons as smoothly as English adverbs do. How did you do your work? Better than yesterday? More slowly? More gracefully? These sentences compare how a person does a particular thing, and they use adverbs; that’s what better, slowly, and gracefully are.
An adverb is a word that describes a verb, or how an action is done: well, poorly, gracefully, and so on.
Create plural nouns in French by adding an s or x, or by substituting –aux for –al. Making French nouns plural, however, takes a different tack when it comes to family names and nouns that end in –s, –x, or –z. In French grammar, here's how you turn a singular noun into a plural noun:
For most nouns, you add -s to the end.
Most French adjectives that describe the characteristics of a noun are placed after that noun. Some adjectives, however, must be placed before the noun they describe, and still others can go either before or after, depending on their meaning.
French adjectives that go after the nouns they describe
In general, and unlike English, French adjectives are placed after the noun they describe.
Depending on whether they modify a verb, an adverb, or an adjective, French adverbs move around quite a bit in the sentence. In English, adverbs are sometimes placed right after the subject of the verb, like she often sings. In French, you can never place the adverb after the subject.
Place French adverbs with verbs in a simple tense
When an adverb modifies a verb conjugated in a simple tense, the adverb follows the verb.
French
Commands are unusual verbal forms, because you don’t use the subject of the verbs in a command. The grammatical name for this conjugation is l’impératif (imperative). For now, you just need to know that this conjugation has three forms only: tu (you [singular informal]), nous (we), and vous (you [singular formal or plural formal and informal]), which are borrowed from the present tense conjugation for most verbs.
French
In the passé composé (present perfect), what is considered the verb is the whole verb unit: auxiliary verb + past participle. For instance, in je suis allé (I went), the verb unit is suis allé, and so the pronoun goes in front of suis, like this: j’y suis allé (I went there).
Don’t confuse the passé composé conjugated with être or avoir (je suis allé) and the futur proche (near future) conjugated with aller, as in je vais aller (I am going to go).
French
In French the pronoun precedes the verb most of the time. What should you do if a sentence has several verbs, as in Il aime regarder la télé (He likes to watch TV), and how can you be sure to place the pronoun in front of the right verb of the two? The answer is in a question actually: “Who do you go with?”
What you need to do is find the noun or phrase you want to replace and then find the verb it goes with (usually the verb is right before its object).
Several vowel combinations are possible in French: two or three vowels together or a vowel and a consonant. But each time the sound produced is a vowel sound, even when a consonant is included.
How to pronounce vowel combinations with a
The combination of a + i sounds like the first vowel sound (eh) in pleasure.
French vowels are all pure and short. (French doesn’t have diphthongs, which are modulations of sounds, kind of like a wave, as in the English words face and mule.) In fact, French has no long sounds at all like you hear in the English words beach and freeze. Each of the vowels in French has one or more sounds.
French
To talk about dates in French, you need numbers and also the names of the days and of the months. You also might need to know the seasons of the year.
French days of the week
The French week (la semaine) starts on Monday (lundi), and the days of the week are not capitalized. Here are the days of the week (les jours de la semaine), starting with Monday.
French has seven direct object pronouns (DOPs) — and three more when you count the forms with an apostrophe. Direct object pronouns, as opposed to indirect object pronouns, DOPs are used when there is the absence of a preposition. Here are the direct object pronouns and their English equivalents.
me (m’ in front of a vowel or mute -h) (me)
te (t’ in front of a vowel or mute -h) (you [singular informal])
le (l’ in front of a vowel or mute -h) (him/it [masculine])
la (l’ in front of a vowel or mute -h) (her/it [feminine])
nous (us)
vous (you [singular formal or plural informal and formal])
les (them)
Because it replaces a noun, a pronoun takes the appearance of the noun as much as possible, kind of like a chameleon!
In the French sentence Nous parlons à nos parents (We talk to our parents), the preposition à (to) stands in the path of the verb object. Meet an indirect object! To replace those types of objects, you now need the indirect object pronoun, or IOP. French grammar has six indirect object pronouns, plus two more when you count the forms with an apostrophe.
French
A stress pronoun in French expresses me (moi), you (toi), him (lui), and so on, to refer to people. It can’t be the subject of a verb, but it comes after a preposition like pour (for) or avec (with), after c’est (it is/this is), after que (than, as) in a comparison, or alone.
The table lists the stress pronouns with the equivalent subject pronouns, followed by the English translation.
In order to put a verb in motion, you need to know who performs the action: the subject. French has nine possible subjects. Here is the list of French subject pronouns with their English equivalents.
je (j’ before a vowel) (I)
tu (you [singular informal])
il (he or it)
elle (she or it)
on (one)
nous (we)
vous (you [singular formal or plural informal and formal])
ils (they [masculine])
elles (they [feminine])
The French pronoun je
Je means I.
Pierre is not simply more intelligent than the other kids in his class, he is the most intelligent in the school (le plus intelligent de l’école). To express that someone (or thing) is the one out of so many, the superlative always includes the definite article the. In French you have to choose between le, la, or les, depending on the gender and number of the noun described.
French
An infinitive is a verb form in which no one is performing the action. In English, the word to always precedes the infinitive; for example, to speak and to dance are infinitives. In French, an infinitive has one of three endings: -er, -ir, or -re. For example parler (to speak), finir (to finish), and vendre (to sell).
French
In French grammar, adjectives have to reflect both the gender (masculine or feminine) and the number of the nouns (singular or plural) they modify. Have a look:
Gender: All French nouns have a gender. If you want to describe a masculine noun, like le vélo (the bicycle), you need a masculine adjective to match, like le vélo noir (the black bicycle).
French
Sometimes you need to use two French pronouns in the same sentence, like to answer As-tu mis les livres sur le bureau? (Did you put the books on the desk?): Oui, je les y ai mis (Yes, I put them there).
With two pronouns, you have several possible combinations that can include (two at a time) the IOPs, DOPs, y, en, and the reflexive pronouns (me, te, se, nous, vous, se).
In French grammar, les prépositions (prepositions) are little words that can answer questions like where, when, and with whom. They are used in combination with other words in a sentence to form a prepositional phrase. For example: dans la cuisine (in the kitchen) and avec mes amis (with my friends) are prepositional phrases that add information to a sentence.
A French stress pronoun replaces or emphasizes a human object. You can find it alone, after c’est (it is), or after a preposition. The beauty of this pronoun is that it’s nonintegrated, which means you don’t need to worry about where to put it in the sentence: It goes right after the preposition or c’est!
There are eight French stress pronouns:
moi (me)
toi (you [singular informal])
lui (him)
elle (her)
nous (us)
vous (you [singular formal or plural formal and informal])
eux (them [masculine])
elles (them [feminine])
Stress pronouns can replace a French noun
After the expression c’est (this is), or also used alone, the stress pronoun emphasizes or points out someone, like in these examples:
— Est-ce que c’est Paul, là-bas?
French
This list assumes that you’re going to make French grammar mistakes. You know it’s true. In fact, the best way to learn a language is to try it out and get corrected when necessary! And the more chances you get to try out a language, the faster you’ll learn. Here are ten common mistakes made in French grammar and how to avoid them.
When you need to move beyond the present, you need new tenses! French has about 18 tenses/moods to choose from. The ones you will use the most are present, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, and imperative for the simple tenses; and the present perfect, pluperfect, future perfect, and past conditional for the compound tenses.
A basic comparison in French starts with an element (either an adjective, a verb, or an adverb) and the type of comparison (more, less, or as):
For more/than, French uses plus/que
For less/than, French uses moins/que
For as/as, French uses aussi/que
The first element is followed by que (than, as), which introduces the original element of a comparison (what you’re comparing against).
After you know the parts of speech in French, you can put them together to compose a sentence. The following information explains how to start with a verb and then add embellishment.
Compose French sentences around a conjugated verb
To function properly in a sentence, a verb needs to be conjugated, which means:
Matching the subject in person (first, second, or third) and number (plural or singular)
Expressing when the action takes place through the use of a tense (now, in the past, in the future, and so on)
To do either one of those two operations, you need to know the pattern of conjugation for your verb.
Just like in English, the French verb provides the action in a sentence. Verbs (les verbes) are the core element of a sentence because they provide essential information. They take many different forms to do so. They indicate:
What action is being performed, through the choice of the infinitive
Who performs it, through the choice of the subject
When it is performed, through the choice of the tense
French infinitive verb forms
The infinitive is like the name of the verb.
When a French noun describes a live being, its gender (masculine or feminine) often reflects the gender of the being in question. For example: The word cheval (horse) is masculine, whereas jument (mare) is feminine, because they both reflect the gender of the animal. Makes sense? Good. But determining gender isn’t always that logical, especially with inanimate objects, like things and ideas.
In French grammar, verbs called pronominal verbs use an extra pronoun. The extra pronouns are reflexive, meaning they typically reflect the subject of the verb, like (to) oneself does to a verb in English. The verbs fall into three categories:
Reflexive verbs: Express an action done by the subject to itself, such as Je me regarde (I look at myself).
French
The French Pronoun en can be used to replace many prepositional phrases that begin with de (which means of, from, and more depending on the prepositional phrase).
French indefinite determiners
Indefinite determiners include the plural indefinite article des (some); the partitives du, de la, de l’ (some/any); and de (which takes the place of those articles after a negative verb).
French
The French pronoun y replaces a prepositional phrase that indicates location, like dans le garage (in the garage). Such phrases begin with a preposition, like at, under, in, and so on. Here’s how to proceed to replace this type of prepositional phrase with y:
Find the phrase that’s introduced by the preposition.
Quel is an interrogative French adjective that means which or what. Like most adjectives, it has four forms: masculine singular (quel) and plural (quels), and feminine singular (quelle) and plural (quelles). The following examples show all four forms in action:
Quel jour sommes-nous? (What day is it?)
Quelle heure est-il?
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