Learn French

French Language Tips

As the name implies here we’re giving notes on French language and French grammar. It is good to have an idea of the French grammar before starting with Bermuda Word French e-books. For other information on our products, go to www.learn-to-read-foreign-languages.com. When reading French stories you’ll run into different grammatical components, divided into Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, etc. It’s important to first know about grammatical components in general. If you do, just feel free to skip the first paragraph.

Grammatical Components

The following are grammatical components of language of which nouns, verbs and adjectives and adverbs are the most commonly known. For example, take the sentence “She quickly eats a lot of her french fries that were on my plate before.” It contains below components.

nouns	fries, plate
verbs	eats, were
adjectives	french
adverbs	quickly
determiners	that, my, her, a lot of
adpositions	on
articles	the
pronouns	She

Nouns and verbs can be inflected to change the tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. For verbs this is also called conjugation, and for nouns, adjectives and pronouns it is called declension. For example “I eat, he eats” where the verb is inflected (conjugated) to show that I or he is eating. For the English language inflection is pretty limited. The list of conjugations for French verbs is larger.

Verb or Adjective Inflections

There’s no need to cram all French grammar before you have done any reading. The best way to acquire new knowledge is to experience it. So start reading and when you run into a peculiar verb form in French just look it up on a chart. Before starting to read French, it is useful to distinguish between language components and be able to recognize for example verb or adjective inflections.

The main component of French grammar is conjugation of the verbs. For verbs in the present tense this is the same as with the English difference between I, you, we, you, they on the one hand (stem) and he/she on the other (+s), i.e. the ending depends on person, mood and/or time:

tu manges, tu danses	you eat, you dance
elle mange, il danse	she eats, he dances

For other verb tenses where in English the verb stays the same no matter the person or number, in French each has a different conjugation:

nous mangions, ils/elles mangeaient	we ate, they ate

For adjectives, in French, inflection means that the suffix is different depending on gender and number:

je (fille) suis heureuse	I (girl) am happy
nous sommes heureux	we are happy

It helps to know that the stem “mang” when you encounter it will have a different ending depening on the person, past or present, or mood.

For French especially verbs have a lot of different inflections while the adjective mainly has those for gender and number. For an example of the inflections of the word “danser” look here.

Once Upon A Time

As you will encounter in the French Fairytales products, the French way of starting a story or stating an event is done differently than in English. In French “It there” is used in conjunction with “to have”. “Il y avait” literally translates to “It there had” and is meant to convey “There was”. “Il y a” is also used to express the English “ago” for things that have already happened. See some examples here:

French sentence	Literal meaning
Une fois, il y avait un petit lapin.	One time, it there had a little rabbit.	Once upon a time there was a little rabbit.
Il y a deux semaines, je l’ai vu.	It there has two weeks, I him have seen.	Two weeks ago, I saw him.

With the Bermuda Word method, we give the literal translation first as you’re here to learn French, so you need to think according to the French order of words.

Negation in French

Another peculiar part of French Grammar is negation. This is mostly done using two words, “ne” and the negative adverb or pronoun given. A list of different forms that can occur with examples:

negation form	literal meaning	example French	example English
ne jamais	not never (never)	Je ne danse jamais.	I never dance.
ne plus	not anymore	Je ne veux plus.	I don’t want to anymore.
ne rien	not nothing (nothing)	Je ne vois rien.	I don’t see anything.
ne personne	no person (nobody)	Je ne vois personne.	I don’t see anybody.

Reflexive Verbs In French

Reflexive verbs are verbs that use a reflexive personal pronoun to point back to the actor of the verb. For example in English “to wash oneself” is a reflexive expression to make clear that you’re washing yourself and not doing the dishes or cleaning your clothes, which, “to wash” or “I’m just washing” might imply.

In French reflexive verbs are formed with a personal pronoun like in English. S’asseoir (to sit oneself), s’arreter (to stop oneself), se raser (to shave oneself). As you can see French seems to use reflexive verbs a lot more often and at places where English wouldn’t. In English you would say “I shaved”, instead of “I shaved myself” and “I stopped”, instead of “I halted myself”. Because we’re just getting you ready for reading French you just need to understand that if you encounter “il s’assit” or “arrêtez-vous par” that it’s simply “he sat down” and “make a stop at” that’s meant.The words “arrêtez-vous” are in present tense, so we will also give the present tense of all its conjugations here.

• je m’arrête -> I halted myself
• tu t’arrêtes -> you halted yourself
• elle s’arrête -> she halted herself
• nous nous arrêtons -> we halted ourselves
• vous vous arrêtez -> you halted yourselves
• ils s’arrêtent -> they halted themselves

Here’s all the conjugations for s’asseoir in the passé simple as well.

• Je m’assis -> I sat down (litterally, I sat myself)
• Tu t’assis -> you sat down (litterally, you sat yourself)
• Il s’assit -> he sat down (litterally, he sat himself)
• Nous nous assîmes -> we sat down (litterally, we sat ourselves)
• Vous vous assîtes -> you sat down (litterally, you sat yourselves)
• Ils s’assirent -> they sat down (litterally, they sat themselves)