How to Learn French Grammar Easily ?
The following has helped many of my students to get their first grip on French grammar and gain much confidence by understanding the relation between the different words and their order in a sentence. That’s why I would like you to be able to benefit from it too.
In this article, you will see how basic grammar notions in French are important in learning to write French essays or to speak French with consistently good results. If you’d like to read more about the power of grammar (or need more convincing!), I wrote an article about it here.
By comparing French and English and using examples in both languages, my intention is to make these basic French grammar notions accessible by students of all levels, as an introduction or as a brush up.
This article does not explore each French grammar notion in depth (this would require dedicated lessons and articles).
Get the free downloadable PDF of “Introduction to French Grammar: What Type of Word is This?”: it includes practice exercises and answers so that you can go the extra mile.
Basic French Grammar Notions
Nouns
- Nouns are words in front of which you can put “a”/”the”.
Ex.: chair → a/the chair → “chair” is a noun
Freedom → a/the freedom → ”freedom” is a noun
To eat → a/the to eat → “to eat” is not a noun - Nouns need an article in front of them (in moooost cases)
- Nouns in French are either masculine or feminine. It’s their gender.
- Nouns can be singular or plural. It’s their number.
- There also are proper nouns. They always start with a capital letter and are names of specific people, places, etc. They often don’t have an article.
Ex: Jessica, Paris, la France, la Seine
Articles
- Articles are the small words you can find before a noun.
- Articles need to agree with the noun (in gender and number)
- There are 3 different types of articles:
Type | In English | In French |
---|---|---|
Indefinite articles → non specific Ex: “un chat” = a cat (a random cat, a cat among others | “a” (singular) (no plural form in English but it would be the equivalent of “some, a plural number of”) | Un, une, des |
Definite articles → specific, used to talk about something that we know:
| The (no translation in English when referring to the general notion, ex. “l’amour”= love) | Le, la les |
Partitive articles
| “some, a certain quantity of” (sometimes not translated in English) | Du, de la, des |
Although they are not officially called articles, I will also add to this “articles” category the following two because they are used the same way as the “real” articles:
Type | In English | In French |
---|---|---|
Possessive adjectives (to say who the noun belong to) | My, your, his, her, our, their | Mon/ma/mes, ton/ta/tes, son/sa/ses, notre/nos, votre/vos, leur/leurs |
Demonstrative adjectives (to point at something/someone) | This, that, these, those | Ce/cet, cette, ces |
Adjectives and adverbs
Adjectives | Adverbs |
---|---|
Describe a noun: Adjectives say how something/someone is Ex: A small street An intelligent man A white rose A scary movie | Describe a verb/an adjective/another adverb:
Ex: The child speaks well (gives information about the verb, how he speaks) It’s a very small street (gives information about the adjective small, how small it is) |
Adjectives need to agree with the nouns that they describe in gender and number. | Adverbs are invariable, i.e their form never changes (there is no feminine or plural form) |
Order in the sentence :
- In English, anything that describes something/someone goes before it:
Ex1: a walk → a 5-minute walk, a relaxing walk
Ex2: a pencil → a sharp pencil, a blue pencil, a wooden pencil
- In French, anything that describes something/someone generally comes after it:
Ex1: une promenade → une promenade de 5 minutes, une promenade relaxante
Ex2: un crayon → un crayon pointu, un crayon bleu, un crayon en bois
⇒ Since adjectives and adverbs are used to describe, adjectives are generally placed after the noun in French and adverbs after the verbs (with exceptions of course. Otherwise learning French wouldn’t be fun!).
Verbs
- Verbs indicate actions or states of being. (to walk, to go out, to become, to think, etc)
- You can conjugate verbs (in the present, past or future tenses).
- The non-conjugated form is called the infinitive (what I call “the untouched/raw form of the verb). It is the form that you will find in your dictionary:
Imagine that I don’t understand the words “went”, “office” and “finished”.
I look them up in my dictionary. What is going to happen?
I will be able to find the word “office”, but I will find no entry for “went” or “finished”.
I would have to know that they are forms of “(to) go” and “(to) finish”. “Go” and “finish” are infinitive forms. “Went” and “finished” are conjugated forms of these verbs.
Infinitive forms in English | Infinitive forms in French |
---|---|
It is the form that you can put “to” in front. Ex : He worked hard. → the action is TO WORK I was sick → the action is TO BE | In French, infinitives end in 3 different endings :
|
Beware of literal translations! Each time you are making a sentence, systematically ask yourself first:
- Which verb to use? (=which action)
- Which tense?
For tips on how to conjugate the most common French tenses easily, read here.
Prepositions
- Prepositions are common small words that are quite tricky because it is not easy to translate them from one language to another.
- They are often used to describe a direction or a location (to, in, next to, behind, on, etc), or in front of a time/date (in August, at 2pm, from today, until tomorrow, etc).
- Some common French prepositions : pour, de, à, avec, sur, sous, devant, à côté de, chez, sans, etc.
- Prepositions can be followed by
- a noun (sometimes with the article, sometimes without)
Ex: Je vais chez Marie / Je vais chez mon amie
Je voudrais un café sans sucre.
J’apprends le français pour le plaisir. - A stress pronoun
Ex : Je vais chez moi.
C’est pour elle/pour lui.
Il part avec toi. - A verb in the infinitive form
Ex : J’apprends le français pour voyager et pour parler avec les natifs.
Il continue à fumer mais il essaie de faire du sport.
- a noun (sometimes with the article, sometimes without)
Pronouns
- Pro = for (in French: “pour”). A pronoun is a small word that replaces a noun (or a group of words) in order to avoid a repetition. (It stands for a noun/a group of words.)
Ex1: Eva is hungry. Eva orders a pizza. → Eva is hungry. She orders a pizza.
Ex2: We are going to the park. Meet us at the park ! → We are going to the park. Meet us there !
Ex3: Daniel loves gardening and playing golf. Rob doesn’t like gardening and playing golf. → Daniel loves gardening and playing golf. Rob doesn’t like that.
Ex4: I saw a movie. I liked watching this movie. → I saw a movie. I liked watching it.
- In French, pronouns are placed in front of the verb they refer to.
Ex1: J’aime les chats → Je les aime.
Ex2 : J’aime regarder les étoiles → J’aime les regarder.
Remember this!
Because the noun is the most important word of a group of word, everything that gravitates around it needs to agree with it/match it (in gender and number):
You can also think of it as a jigsaw puzzle:
“maison”: (=”house”) This noun is feminine in French.
You can add one or several adjectives to describe the house in more details. Let’s say that you want to say that it is BLUE.
The word/adjective for “blue” in French is “bleu” (for the masculine form) and “bleue” for the feminine (it’s very common to form the feminine version of a word by adding a final “_e”).
To say “a blue house”, you need to “clip” a feminine singular article to the noun “maison”, and to also clip the feminine singular form of the adjective blue. It all needs to be consistent with the gender and number of the noun (“maison”).
⇒“ une maison bleue”
Don’t forget that you can download the PDF version of this article (with exercises and answers) below.
Feel free to contact me if you have any question or feedback! If you haven’t already, sign up to receive updates on new tutorials that will help you understand French grammar and everything French! 🙂
Get Worksheet