Archive for 'Grammar'
French Language – Voilà or Il y a Posted by Transparent Language on Mar 17, 2009
Voilà is one of my favorite expressions in French. It just seems so French and much more appealing than its English equivalents: ‘there is’ and ‘there are’. However, you must be careful because Il y a has the same English translation so to speak, but the meaning or useage is different. Voilà is used as if you are pointing…
How to Make French Nouns Plural Posted by Transparent Language on Mar 11, 2009
Making nouns plural in the French language can be a bit more complicated than English, but perhaps not. Just like in English, you normally add an -s to the written form of the singular. I say written form, because usually the pronunciation doesn’t change one bit when using a plural noun, except for the links…
French Language – Gender of Inanimate Nouns Posted by Transparent Language on Feb 25, 2009
We’ve talked about gender before and today we’ll discuss it some more as it can be difficult for English speakers when learning French because we don’t really have these issues in our language. Many nouns have a fixed gender. The suffixes can indicate the gender of these nouns, but there are many, many exceptions. Some…
French Language – Subject/Verb Agreement Posted by Transparent Language on Feb 16, 2009
One of the things that makes the French language so trying at times is l’accord. Agreement in gender, number and person between subjects and verbs, adjectives, nouns, articles, pronouns, etc. Today, we’ll talk about the first kind. 1. Mes filles aiment leurs poupées Disney. (My daughters love their Disney dolls.) 2. C’est nous qui sommes…
French Language – Prepositions + Countries/Cities Posted by Transparent Language on Jan 26, 2009
Je viens des États-Unis, j’habite en Espagne, mais je vais en France. (I’m from the United States, I live in Spain but, I’m going to France.) This is a simple sentence, some part of which is often used when meeting people in international contexts, but which in French can sometimes seem complicated to English speakers because…
French Language – Let’s Talk About Verbs Again Posted by Transparent Language on Jan 12, 2009
Just as in English (i.e. I gave my mother some flowers)…many verbs in French can be followed by two objects. The sentence structure in these cases can be a bit complicated and involves some memorization of which verbs go with which structures. I’ll outline these structures in this article. The most common structure which is…
French Language – Animate Nouns and Gender Posted by Transparent Language on Dec 11, 2008
We could say that there are six different types of nouns: animate nouns (people, animals), inanimate nouns (things, ideas), proper nouns (such as cities and names), common nouns (such as avenue, liberté), simple nouns (such as fourchette, papier, ami) and compound nouns (such as croque-monsieur, boîte aux lettres). Today, we’re going to talk about animate…