Sentence structure in French

If you want to be able to string a sentence together in French, you first need to know how sentences work. For the most part, sentences in French work in a similar way to how they do in English, as both languages follow the SVO – subject, verb, object – order. Hence the order of the following sentence does not change when we translate it from English to French:

I eat apples. - Je mange des pommes.

As we create more complex sentences, however, we need to be mindful of some rules found in French sentence structure that aren’t used in English.

In English, adjectives typically come before the noun.


In French, however, adjectives usually come after the noun, as in the following examples:


Une voiture rouge - 'A red car'

Un enfant poli - 'A polite child'

Un livre intéressant - 'An interesting book'


There are, however, some exceptions to this rule. Certain adjectives, especially those that describe beauty, age, goodness, and size (what are known as 'BAGS' adjectives - more on this in Lesson 03 of the Complete French Course) often come before the noun.


Examples:

Un grand chien - 'A big dog'

Une jeune fille - 'A young girl'

Un beau jardin - 'A beautiful garden'


There are also some adjectives that change meaning depending on whether they come before or after the noun they are describing. Read our blog on the subject to find out which common adjectives fall under this category.

Subject pronouns work in French the same way they do in English.

Examples:

Il parle français. - 'He speaks French.'

Nous sommes contents. - 'We are happy.'

Object pronouns, on the other hand, change the sentence structure completely, from SVO to SOV. This means that the object pronoun precedes the verb:

Je vois le chien. - 'I see the dog.'

Je le vois. - 'I see him.'

Ils construiront le château. - 'They will build the castle.'

Ils le construiront. - 'They will build it.'

When there are two object pronouns, both will come before the verb, in a specific order:

Il me le donne. - 'He gives it to me.'

For more on this, check out Lesson 26 of the Complete French Course.

In English, we use the word ‘not’ to make a verb negative.

In French, we often use two words: ne and pas. These usually come on either side of the verb:

Je ne comprends pas. ('I do not understand')

When using the passé composé, ne and pas will frame the auxiliary verb, not the participle:

Je n’ai pas compris. ('I did not understand')

There are a few different ways of asking questions in French, each of which has its own sentence structure.

First of all, you can usually add est-ce que to the beginning of a statement to turn it into a question, without changing the word order:

Tu parles anglais. - 'You speak English.'

Est-ce que tu parles anglais ? - 'Do you speak English?'

Though it's more informal, you can also ask a question just by raising the intonation at the end of a regular sentence, just like in English:

Tu parles anglais ? - 'You speak English?'

Another way of asking a question is by inverting the subject and verb and connecting them with a hyphen. This is the most formal way to address a question.

Examples:

Parles-tu anglais ? ('Do you speak English?')

Aime-t-elle le chocolat ? ('Does she like chocolate?')

Note in the last example, we add a 't' between aime and elle, as elle begins with a vowel.
For more on how to ask questions in French, check out our blog on the subject.