Veronique Mazet

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.