Archive for 'Grammar'
5 Faux Amis to Watch Out For Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Apr 20, 2015
Les faux amis, or false friends, are words or phrases that look the same or very similar in one language, but differ greatly in meaning. These are also known, more technically, as false cognates. Les faux amis can be tricky for many levels of French learners and are made even trickier by the fact that…
L’accent tonique (French Phonetics III) Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 23, 2015
Hello everyone! Today, as promised, we will be going over l’accent tonique, or the tonic accent, which has to do with stressing a particular word in a sentence for emphasis. As you’ve read in the previous posts in this series on French phonetics, in French you don’t stress individual words to emphasize them. Rather, word…
An Introduction to French Phonetics Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Mar 9, 2015
One of the hardest things for advanced French language learners to grasp is how to sound like a native speaker. Your accent largely depends on the age at which you first learned a language. But what can be even trickier than working on the perfect pronunciation of each word is mastering the rhythm of the…
Be CaReFuL! Final Consonant Pronunciation in French Posted by Josh Dougherty on Mar 5, 2015
Behind French’s beautiful sounds is a very complicated pronunciation system. Unlike Spanish, for example, the words aren’t always pronounced as they’re spelled; c’est-à-dire que c’est n’est pas une langue phonétique (that is to say that isn’t not a phonetic language). Why are –er, –é, –ay, –ai, –ais, –ait, and –aient all pronounced the same? It’s…
Tout sur Tout: Everything You Need to Know about Tout Posted by Josh Dougherty on Feb 20, 2015
Tout is a very versatile word in French — you’ll generally find it means “all,” but you’ll notice different meanings when you see all its forms. This little word can be used as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, and a pronoun, and all with varying forms. We’ll go over all of those separately. I…
How to Avoid the French Subjunctive Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Feb 16, 2015
This is my fourth and final post in the series on forming and using the subjunctive mood in French. If you haven’t guessed already based, the subjunctive is vital to speaking (and writing) French like a native — that’s why I’ve dedicated so much time to it. However, many students are still quite intimidated by…
Subjunctive: Irregular and Stem-Changing Verbs Posted by Elizabeth Schmermund on Feb 9, 2015
As I mentioned last week, besides evaluating in which circumstances to use the French subjunctive, the most difficult part of this mood is learning how to conjugate irregular and stem-changing verbs into the subjunctive. Luckily, there are only about 10 verbs that are irregular and 10 verbs that are stem-changing in the subjunctive – although…