French Grammar Essentials

To become fluent in French, there are two things in particular you need to master: vocabulary and grammar.

At Learn French With Alexa, we aim to provide extensive resources on both of these areas. For vocabulary, we have tons of themed lists to help you familiarise yourself with the French language in all sorts of contexts, and Alexa introduces viewers to new words on social media on an almost daily basis.

That said, learning vocabulary requires a lot of independent study - it's up to you, as the learner, to memorise new words you encounter, and put them into practice.

Grammar, on the other hand, is much more complex, and requires an expert teacher's guidance and structure. Crucially, it's important that you don't get overwhelmed, and know which areas to tackle at which points in your language learning journey. So, if you're just starting out, it's vital to know where you should start. In other words, you need to know the essentials of French grammar.

Dreamstime m 90070783

Tenses

There are quite a number of tenses and moods in French. But if you're a beginner, you'll probably want to stick to the present. It's by far the most common tense in everyday conversation, is pretty simple to understand - once you get your head around irregular verbs - and will equip you with the framework you need in order to understand how sentences work in French. Once you've got these basics mastered, transferring what you've learned to other tenses will be easy!

Which tense should you move on to after the present? The safest way to tackle this question is to progress through the tenses in order of how frequently they are used. So once you've mastered the present, move on to the imparfait, passé composé, futur and imperatif, then the conditionnel, subjonctif etc.

Knowing how and when to use the tenses can be a little tricky, especially as they don't always translate exactly between English and French. For example, the imperfect in French can be translated into English as 'I was doing' or 'I used to do'. On the other hand, the present continuous - 'I am doing' - is much less common in French than it is in English.

But by far the most challenging part of learning French tenses is the conjugations. These can be...confusing, to say the least. Generally speaking, verbs will fall into three different conjugation patterns: '-ir', '-er' and '-re' verbs, or what we call the first, second and third conjugations groups, respectively. These each conjugate in similar, but slightly different, fashions, which you can explore here. But then there are irregular verbs, too, whose patterns you will have to learn individually.

You should also familiarise yourself with the auxiliary verbs, 'avoir' and 'être'. Once you've learnt the conjugations for these two words, the passé composé, plus-que-parfait, futur antérieur, conditionnel passé, subjonctif passé, subjonctif plus-que-parfait and passé antérieur tenses for any verb will be simple to figure out. The reason for this is that you only need to conjugate the auxiliary verb - for the verb in question, you just need to use the participle. For example

'j'écris' looks like:

'j'ai écrit' in the passé composé

'j'eus écrit' in the passé antérieur

'j'eusse écrit' in the plus-que-parfait

This means that once you've learnt the conjugations for 'avoir' and 'être', you'll be able to conjugate any verb into these tenses.

Long story short, it's a numbers game. Don't expect to learn everything about French tenses in a day. But you'll find that as you progress in your learning journey, you'll figure out everything you need to know about conjugations and tenses naturally.

Adjectives

While adjectives fall under the umbrella of vocabulary, the question of how we use them is a grammatical one. Unlike in English, they can appear after the noun as well as before, depending on the word and its context.

What's important to bear in mind about adjectives is that they come in different forms. There are your standard descriptors, of course - words like 'petit', 'gros', 'marron', 'français', etc. And then there are demonstrative adjectives - 'ce', 'cet', 'cette' and 'ces'. These go hand in hand with relative pronouns such as 'qui' and 'que'. We strongly recommend you get acquainted with the differences between these words as early as possible.

Then there are 'possessive' adjectives: 'mon', 'ma', 'mes', 'ton' 'ta', 'tes', etc. You'll encounter these very often, so learn them early on.

There are also types of adjective which exist in English but which don't in French - or, at least, they are translated in a different way. Take the adjective 'hot' in English as an example ('chaud' in French). If we were to turn this into a comparative adjective, we would say 'hotter'. But in French, we would have to say 'plus chaud'. And if we wanted to turn it into a superlative, we would have to say 'le plus chaud'. The form of the adjective itself doesn't actually change.

Dreamstime m 44866259

Gender

French is a gendered language, which means that every noun and pronoun is either feminine or masculine. Which in turn means that any article that precedes the word, or any adjective that describes it, also has to be the same gender, meaning it will be spelt and sometimes even pronounced differently.

If your first language is an ungendered language, such as English, this might take some getting used to. But as you progress with your learning, and start recognising some of the patterns which help you determine the gender of words, you'll start to get the hang of it. We recommend learning and memorising nouns alongside their corresponding articles to avoid confusion further down the line. For instance, instead of

strawberry - fraise

melon - melon

raspberry - framboise

try learning with the article:

(the) strawberry - la fraise

(the) melon - le melon

(the) raspberry - la framboise

Articles

Speaking of articles, these little words are easy to learn, but - unlike some languages, which don't use articles at all - are absolutely fundamental to every part of the French language. You'll struggle to make a sentence without one!

By articles we don’t mean newspaper op-eds or Learn French with Alexa blogs…although reading these are always a good way to improve your language skills. Rather, articles are the words that help us determine whether a noun is definite or indefinite. 'Le', 'la','les' (definite), 'un', 'une', 'des' (indefinite) are all examples, and you won't be surprised to learn that these are the most commonly used words in the French language.

Unlike in English, articles also have a habit of combining with prepositions such as 'de' or 'à', so you should also learn these early on - or else you'll end up wondering why the articles you're so familiar with have suddenly taken on such a weird spelling...

Sentence Structure

Sentence structure in French isn’t a million miles from sentence structure in English - but it still trips learners up. Both languages use a sentence-verb-object sentence structure, but beyond this standard framework, there are some areas in which speakers of French express themselves differently.

For instance, we've already mentioned how adjectives usually come after the noun they describe. But did you know that there are other small differences? For example, the object pronoun 'it' - 'la', 'le', 'l' or 'les' in French, depending on the gender and number of the noun it refers to, as well as whether it begins with a vowel or consonant - always comes before the verb in French. As an example, the phrase 'I have read it' would be translated into French as 'je l'ai lu'.

Additionally, when we form a question in French, the verb typically comes at the beginning of the sentence. We do this in English with the word 'do'; but since 'do' does not have a direct translation in French, we put the main verb at the start instead. For example, the question 'Do you speak French?' would be rendered in French as 'Parlez-vous français ?' You could also say 'Est-ce-que vous parlez français ?' Questions in French can be posed with the phrase 'Est-ce-que' (is it that) - which, while you can technically say it in English, is extremely uncommon.

Another thing to note is that the way to make a statement, command or question negative in French often involves the phrase 'ne pas', with 'ne' typically coming before the verb and 'pas' coming after, whereas in English we use the single word 'not' before the verb. There are lots of small differences like this, which you'll encounter over the course of your French-learning journey. Make a note of them!

Dreamstime m 65248352

Punctuation

Though it isn't strictly grammar, it's important that you get your head around French punctuation. So many students learn French to proficiency without learning these very simple points.

Firstly, speech marks - these are used in a very different way from how they are used in English. In fact, in French we do not use speech marks at all - to designate speech, we use guillemets (« »). Inverted commas are generally only used to designate quotes within larger quotes. Another thing to bear in mind is that when a longer conversation is being depicted, for instance in a novel, guillemets are only used at the start and at the end. New speakers are indicated with em dashes.

Before you go correcting French speakers on their use of punctuation, it's important to understand that in French, we always leave a space between the word and exclamation marks or question marks. Have you ever encountered a question mark like this ? The person asking the question is probably French !

Or is that 'french'? In français, adjectives describing nationality or language are not capitalised. Nor are days of the week or months of the year.

Conclusion

So there it is: a whistle-stop tour of the all things French grammar. If you want to dive deeper into each of these areas, it's a good idea to subscribe to the Complete French Course, where each topic is addressed in depth in one or more of the 40 lessons available.