Basic French 3: Pronouns and the word “it”

Oddly enough for such a little word, one of the biggest differences between English and French is that French has no single word for the English pronoun “it”, and it is amazing what a difference that makes. It’s the most versatile pronoun we’ve got; it can be subject, direct or indirect object, it can be human, animal or inanimate. And French has no equivalent. Rather, there are several different words meaning “it” and which one you need depends who or what you’re talking about and the grammatical function it serves.

 

Nominative                       Accusative                Dative  (at)               Genitive (of)

je                                           me                            me

tu                                          te                               te

il / elle / on                         le / la                       lui / lui  /  y                   en

nous                                    nous                          nous

vous                                    vous                           vous

ils / elles                               les                           leur  / y                      en

 

Notice the accusative third person pronouns le, la and les look exactly the same as the definite articles le, la and les. You have to be very clear about the difference between a pronoun and an article.

The definite articles le, la and les appear alongside a noun, singling the particular one or ones out distinct from all their kind.

The pronouns le, la and les appear instead of a noun, meaning “it” or “them”

Now, that’s going to take some getting used to, and it can feel mystifying like how will you know it’s a pronoun or not stuck in the middle of a sentence full of words you don’t even know. You’ll never remember the difference.

You will, once you’ve learnt to read French and recognise verb-pronoun groups.

We haven’t even started yet, we couldn’t really until we got articles and pronouns ready first. That’s why I’ve been a bit cursory. The reason I haven’t shown much of anything yet is that you really do need a few pronouns and articles before you start on verbs. I don’t mean you’re supposed to know all these yet, I just mean that you need to see them, be aware of them. All I’ve done here is shove them down and walk away, that’s not teaching anything. We’re still getting set up. we haven’t started yet.

The real beginning of French is when you do verbs. Language isn’t really language without those. Verbs and the relations around verbs is where proper language happens. And that’s where it all gets easier. We’ll be going round in cycles a lot, anyway, add a bit, revise a bit, add a bit. There’s no point trying to learn in one long straight line, and then one day you’re fluent. It doesn’t work like that, and even if it did, it shouldn’t. It’s far more free and dynamic.

 

 

 

Basic French 2: Person and Case (definitions)

You can’t learn French without knowing these because in French you need different pronouns for different grammatical case. A few grammatical functions to begin with.

Pronoun: Stands in place of a noun which is already understood.

That man is a mass murderer. He is a mass murderer

Sarah turns tricks behind the bus station. She is a prostitute

 

Subject:  That which enacts a verb. Every verb has to be enacted by a someone or a something, and what or whoever does the verb is the subject of it.

Object:   That which is acted upon, either directly or indirectly

Direct object: Acted upon with no intermediate preposition between a verb and its object, whether a noun or pronoun

He stole the money

They murdered him 

Indirect object: Acted upon with a preposition between the verb and its object

He came for the drugs

She spat in his face

Preposition: A word standing between a verb and its object giving either direction or relation. Up, down, by, through, for, from, of, at etc.

 

Persons:

1st person:  Whoever is addressing another

2nd person: Whoever is being addressed

3rd person: Whoever, or whatever, the 1st and 2nd person are talking about

 

Case:

The form of a personal pronoun according to its grammatical function

Nominative:  The subject form of pronoun

Accusative: The direct object form of pronoun

Dative: An indirect object, either a noun following the dative preposition “at” or a dative pronoun including the prepositional concept “at” within it.

Genitive: An indirect object, either a noun following the genitive preposition “of” or a genitive pronoun including the prepositional concept “of” within it.

Disjunctive: An indirect pronoun following after a separate preposition.

 

 

 

 

Basic French 1. The Articles

From scratch.

The first awkward thing about French when your native language is English, is coming to terms with the whole idea of gender and agreement, but it’s not quite as bad as it looks. There are four kinds altogether, and we’ll get to them all in time, but just to give you an idea of the range, they are

1. Articles, which always appear alongside nouns       (always agree)
2. Adjectives, which always appear alongside nouns   (always agree)
3. Pronouns that stand instead of nouns                    (mostly agree, a few not)
4. Participles in compound tenses of verbs                 (agree in certain cases)

 

In French, every noun comes in either masculine or feminine, and the definite and indefinite article has to agree with the gender, in singular or plural, of the noun it appears with.

English nouns don’t have gender, and the definite article makes no distinction for singular and plural. The house. The houses. But French has different words for the masculine, the feminine and the plural.

Definite article:  The

le   (masc. singular beginning with a consonant)

la   (fem. singular beginning with a consonant)

l’   (masc. or fem. singular beginning with a vowel)

les    (masc. or fem. plural)

Indefinite article:  a or an

un   (masc. singular)

une   (fem. singular)

des  (masc.  and  fem. plural)

Part article:  some

du    (masc. noun beginning with a consonant)

de la   (fem. noun beginning with a consonant)

de l’  (masc. or fem. noun beginning with a vowel)

 

You can see a couple of important differences between French and English already.

First, English has no indefinite plural article equivalent to the French des. We say an apple, but for more than one we often just say “apples.”  Eg. “You forgot to get apples.” Or you can use the word “some” as a filler, as in “Go and get some nails.”

But in French, it doesn’t exactly mean “some”. It could be a lot, could be few, it just means an indefinite number more than one, and you never miss out the article for an indefinite plural in French.

apples   des pommes

Indefinite mass nouns are those sort of things that don’t come in countable units. Things like for example, water, rust, putty, wood, where you don’t count it in separate units. You can have planks of wood, of course, but there it’s the plank that’s being counted in the plural, the substance wood only comes in a singular indefinite quantity.

Some nouns can be either mass or several noun depending on the context

The garden was covered in shadow  (mass noun)

The garden was covered in shadows (several noun)

 

Assuming, just pretend, that you don’t know any more French than that, you wouldn’t be able to make very much out of something like this:

 

“Le garçon blond descedit les derniers rochers et se dirigea vers la lagune en regardant où il posait les pieds. Il se tenait à la main son tricot de collège qui traînait par terre; sa chemise grise adhérait à sa peau et ses cheveux lui collaient au front. Autour de lui, la profonde déchirure de la jungle formait comme un bain de vapeur.”

                                                                                                                      Lord of the Flies

 

It blurs into an indecipherable word soup, shapes that have no grammatic sense for you to find your way around. But see now, when you read the opening of something equally meaningless like Jabberwocky, you have no trouble with it at all:

 

Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome wraths outgrabe

 

The reason you can make so much more sense of that is because grammatically it’s written in perfect English. The nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs may not mean very much in themselves, but still you have no trouble at all recognising it as English and applying all the meanings for yourself. It’s also a very clever use of vowel-consonant pattern, and any of those words could easily pass for English. Even more important than all of that, though, the basic grammatical functions are left untouched.

Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Twas           and the                       did         and               in the

You know by main verb, articles and conjunctions that you’re reading English, and so you start to fill in the nouns and adjectives by association, guessing your way through the vocabulary while reading by grammar alone. If on the other hand you were given something like this, you would get nowhere with it.

Hoople brillig gok loshlosh slithy toves preb gyre gork gimble

loshlosh wabe

Pure gibberish. With all the grammatical elements gone, you have no way of keeping track of it now, and your brain doesn’t even try, it just gives up. The fundamental structure of the language is gone. That’s how French, or any foreign language, can seem when it’s completely new and the words don’t have any familiar tone to help you decipher their relation to one another.

So the trick to learning how to read French is in learning these root words first, and it turns out there are not that many of them, so that you can get familiar with its syntax and style and learn to read it as well as you can Jabberwocky, even when you might not be sure of all the vocabulary.

In French just like English, definite and indefinite articles always appear alongside nouns, so try reading this again with the whole thing split up into separate bars like music.

 

Le garçon   /  blond descedit  /  les derniers rochers  /   et se dirigea vers  /   la lagune en regardant où  /  il posait les pieds. /   Il se tenait  /  à la main  /  son tricot de collège  /  qui traînait par terre;/   sa chemise grise  / adhérait à  /  sa peau  /  et ses cheveux lui collaient au front.  /   Autour de lui,  /  la profonde déchirure   /  de la jungle  /  formait comme   /   un bain de vapeur.

 

There is a lot of other stuff in there than just the articles, but you don’t need to worry about any of those yet, we’re going to get to everything. As we get further on  you’ll be able to recognise more and more of the grammatical functions and their relations just like you can with English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

French for Fun

Everyone knows that Britain is one of the worst countries in the world at foreign languages. This is nothing new, and there have been various explanations over the years, or excuses if we’re honest, whether something about having English as your first language makes it specially difficult to think your way into others, or if the worldwide use of English makes us lazy to learn others. Maybe it’s a bit of both, but whatever the cause, we are the odd ones out of all European countries in being steadfast monoglot.

I’m not talking about you. Perish it. No, I’m talking about me and my catastrophic failure to get anywhere in spite of all the time. I wanted to speak French, but somehow the bits I did pick up never seemed to arrive at anything like a language, and I came out in the end with no more sense of it as a language than I went in. That must happen to a lot of people, and having tried and got nowhere, we never really go back to it again. Anyway, who wants to go through all that exam business, plodding through all that tedium and revision. So I came to the idea that I wasn’t interested in getting a qualification, I wanted to get straight to the root and learn it as a language, and a quick look around the books available told me that if I was going to do that, I was going to have to teach myself.

What I found straightaway was that I had virtually no grasp of grammatical function in English. Obviously I was fluent in English, but I had never been shown through the technical elements of the language or taken much note of how it gelled and knotted together in all its complex relations; so in the course of learning French I also ended up going through all the basic English grammar and trying to relate the two. There was a lot of stumbling and fumbling in want of a structure and a system, but I did manage to get it all eventually into some kind of logical order. And once I could see the whole thing overall, it was pretty clear that the reason we are so bad at languages is that we are doing just about everything wrong. I don’t mean anyone’s getting particular bits wrong or teaching the wrong word for the wrong thing. I mean our whole approach, our attitude and method are all wrong.

In the Olden Days before the internet we had so little to do with foreigners that all the French you would ever see or hear was what they gave you in the classroom, and you had no way of knowing if it would be even remotely useful face to face with real French people. It probably wouldn’t, but you would never know that except when you took pause to wonder in the middle of all this plodding through the books with their disjointed phrases buying apples and is it raining, where the hell was all the rest of it. Where was the whole range of expression, all the tenses and relations that come so naturally in your own language that a six year old can master them, where was it all? Real French. It just never seemed to arrive.

There is a bit of a logic flop in our whole approach to languages. You see, we’ve mastered one language already. It’s not like a brand new field like science or maths, full of difficult concepts that turn your whole universe upside down. by the age of ten you are so fluent in English that you can stand a conversation with a sixty year old and make ready with all the clauses and the tenses and cases without even thinking about them. You could never do that with maths, but you can do it with language like a little miracle. Now, if a ten year old in France can have the mastery of French as you with the mastery of English, then surely it can’t be beyond our wits to learn it, me and you.

So why is it, then, great sage, that we are so godawful at foreign languages? Morality, I reckon. That hellpit of zombified stagnation where imagination goes to die. I sometimes think this country would be better fit if all the moral men with their little potato heads went off to live on the Isle of Wight and write their doltish letters to the newspapers about moral improvement. Honest to God, I swear there are people in this country who think everything has to be made as painful as possible before they can find any value in it, like a bunch of wobbleheaded puritans. away with such lamentable specimens and their wretched letters to newspapers correcting everyone’s grammar like they think they’re saving your soul.

Grammar itself, mind you, is great fun. Morality is piss. But grammar, real grammar in the sense of linguistics, those complex relations of word and phrase, it’s fascinating once you get into it and start fathoming all the machinery. All that grammar involves, or ever should involve, is drawing attention to aspects of language that you never noticed before, and giving names to them. That’s it. That’s all it needs to be. It’s fascinating stuff, and once you have it presented in a logical way, nowhere near as difficult as people think it is.

So I have decided to write up everything I’ve learnt in the same way I taught myself, just in case anyone should be interested. And I’m going to keep it short enough, one post at a time, covering each grammatical element until we’ve introduced all the basic functions, and then go round again in cycles, adding new vocabulary, idioms and dealing with particular expression. And what we’re aiming at is the ability to read French first of all, then write your own to the same kind of fluency as a ten year old. A Percy Jackson novel, something like that, with all the subjunctives and relative clauses you could want.

And, with a bit of luck, you’ll want to carry on and on. There’s all the French you could want, millions of it all over the internet. And German and Spanish, Italian. We don’t have to be stuck in the ancient ways.