Die ganze Grammatik

French has one word for «to be», which is one less than Spanish and exactly as many as English. The line is drawn somewhere else instead, and that is the whole of the difficulty here: *age, hunger, thirst, fear, heat and cold are things you have* in French.** J'ai vingt ans is literally «I have twenty years», and «I am twenty» translated word for word — je suis vingt ans — is not a sentence anybody can read. The same goes for j'ai faim, j'ai froid, j'ai peur, j'ai raison. Two smaller things come with them. A job takes no article: je suis professeur, never «a teacher». And «there is» and «there are» are one unchanging il y a — French does not make the verb agree the way English does. Both verbs are irregular, both are needed on the first day, and both are later the auxiliaries for the past.

French verbs sort themselves by the ending of the infinitive: -er, -ir, -re. The first set is far the largest — learn it and you have four verbs in five. What is genuinely strange for an English speaker is something else: *four of the six forms sound identical.* je parle, tu parles, il parle and ils parlent are one word to the ear. English inflects almost nothing and what little it has — the -s of «he speaks» — is audible; French writes distinctions it does not say, which is why the pronoun is never left out. The other thing to unlearn is the shape of the tense itself: there is no «am reading» and no «do you read». Je lis is all three English present tenses at once.

A French noun almost always carries an article, including in the places English leaves bare: J'aime le café is «I like coffee», Les enfants jouent is «children are playing». Two things are new outright. *Nouns have a gender*, and English has none to build on — le livre and la table have to be learnt with the article attached, because nothing about a table is feminine. And there is an article English does not possess at all, the partitive: du pain, de la viande, in front of anything you cannot count. English has «some», but «some» is optional and du is not. That is the first place where translating word for word fails every time, which is why this section comes early rather than late.

A French noun carries a gender, and English gives you nothing to build on: the language dropped grammatical gender around eight hundred years ago, and everything that is not a person has been «it» ever since. So le soleil and la lune are not a rule to learn but a fact to memorise, one word at a time, and the article is part of the word. The plural is the opposite problem. It looks like English — a -s on the end — but that -s is silent, so l'ami and les amis differ only in the article. In English the ear does the counting; in French the article does, which is why a French noun so rarely stands bare.

An English adjective is the most placid word in the language: it never changes shape, and it always stands in front of the noun. Both of those stop being true here. A French adjective *agrees* — a letter for the feminine, another for the plural — and it normally stands *behind* the noun: une voiture rouge, a red car, in that order. A short list of very common words goes in front instead, which is the one place your instinct is right: un grand jardin. So there are two habits to build at once, and they pull in opposite directions — the agreement is mostly silent and has to be written, and the position is audible and has to be rehearsed.

This is the section where English word order gives way. A French object pronoun stands *before* the verb: je le vois is «I see him», in that order. Then there are two pronouns English has no word for at all — y for a place or anything introduced by à, en for a quantity or anything introduced by de: J'y vais, j'en ai deux. English gets by with «there» and «some», and both are optional in a way these are not. And a possessive here agrees with the thing owned rather than the owner, which quietly removes the distinction «his» and «her» are carrying in every English sentence.

English does both of these jobs with an extra verb. «I don't understand» and «Do you understand?» both bring in «do», a word that means nothing and exists only to carry the negation and the question. French has no such device and needs none. It negates by putting two small words around the verb it already has — ne … pas — and it asks in three ways that differ in tone rather than in meaning: intonation alone, est-ce que in front, or verb and pronoun swapped. So the thing to unlearn here is «do», and the thing to learn is that a negative sentence has a bracket in it: ne before the verb and pas after, and in speech the first half quietly disappears.

French tells a story with two past tenses, and the choice between them is close to one English already makes. The passé composé says what happened; the imparfait says what was going on. Il pleuvait quand je suis sorti — it was raining when I went out: a setting and an event inside it. English splits the same job between «it rained» and «it was raining», so the instinct is already there. Two things are new. The compound form looks like «I have spoken» but is used like «I spoke», with «yesterday» and all — the English rule that bans «I have seen it yesterday» does not apply here. And a small group of verbs builds the past with être rather than avoir, and there the participle agrees with the subject.

This is the section where English is most useful, because the two languages divide the future in almost the same way. English has three futures — «the train leaves at eight», «I'm going to leave», «I will leave» — and French has the same three, with the same connotations: the present for a timetable, aller plus the infinitive for an intention, and the futur simple for a promise or a prediction. Je vais partir *is* «I'm going to leave», word for word. What is new is the third one's shape: English has «will», one word for every person, and French has a set of endings on the infinitive. Those same stems carry the conditional, which is why the two stand together here.

English has one imperative and it is the bare verb: «look», to one person or a hundred, politely or rudely. French has three, one for each person you can address — tu, nous, vous — and each is simply the present tense with the pronoun removed. The nous one is the interesting arrival: Allons-y ! is «Let's go», a whole sentence type built into the verb rather than assembled out of «let» and «us». Two things then make it fiddly. Verbs in -er drop the s in the tu form, and pronouns move — behind the verb when you say do, in front of it when you say don't.

English modals are a closed club with strange rules: «can» has no infinitive, no participle and no third-person -s, «must» has no past at all, and none of them takes «to». French has no such club. pouvoir, devoir, vouloir and savoir are ordinary verbs — irregular, but fully conjugated, with participles and futures like any other — and the infinitive follows them bare, exactly as it does after «can». So the shape is familiar and the paradigm is not. Two other things cost English speakers a sentence each. «Know» is two verbs here, and so is «can»: savoir for what you learnt, pouvoir for what you are able to do today. And the commonest «must» has no subject at all: il faut stands in for everybody.

Prepositions cannot be translated; they have to be learnt attached to the word they belong to, and English speakers already know that from «proud of», «interested in», «good at». Two things here are new all the same. à and de *weld* onto the definite article — à + le → au, de + les → des — and English has no welded forms at all: «to the» and «of the» stay two words for ever. And with countries the gender of the country picks the word: en France, but au Portugal and à Paris, where English says «in» for all three and marks nothing.

The subjunctive is famous for expressing the speaker's attitude — wish, doubt, feeling. The more useful description is the other one: it follows a short list of expressions, and knowing the list gets it right every time. English has almost lost this mood, keeping it only in a few fossils — «I insist that he *be* present», «if I *were* you», «God save the Queen» — and most people avoid even those. So the category itself is new, and the good news is how small it is: it appears almost always in a clause after que, almost never on its own, and only one of its tenses is used in ordinary speech.

This is the section where English speakers can trust their own grammar almost completely. English has the same three conditionals in the same three shapes: present after «if» with «will» in the other half, past after «if» with «would», and past perfect after «if» with «would have». French does exactly that with présent, imparfait and plus-que-parfait. Even the great prohibition is shared: *nothing conditional ever follows si*, and «if I would have known» is as wrong in English as si j'aurais su is here. What has to be learnt is the vocabulary of the connectors — and one of them, au cas où, breaks the rule on purpose.

The French passive is built like the English one, être plus a participle, and the difference is not in the machinery but in how much it is used. English reaches for the passive constantly; French reaches for on instead — On parle français ici rather than «French is spoken here». Translate every English passive word for word and you write French that is correct and reads like a translation. Two things in the machinery differ too, and both are worth knowing early: the participle *agrees* with the subject, which English participles never do, and only a direct object can become a subject — so «he was told», «he was given a book» and «the bed was slept in» have no French equivalent at all.

Two things English does with relative clauses have no French equivalent, and between them they cause most of the trouble here. English can leave the pronoun out altogether — the book I read — and English can push the preposition to the end — the film I told you about. French allows neither: the connecting word is compulsory and the preposition goes in front of it. The second habit to unlearn is the question English asks. English chooses between who and which by whether the thing is a person; French does not care about that at all. qui and que are chosen by what the word does inside the clause — subject or object — and a person and a table take exactly the same word.

This is the area where English gives you the most for free. English backshifts as well, and the chain matches step for step: he is becomes he was, he has paid becomes he had paid, he will come becomes he would come — imparfait, plus-que-parfait, conditionnel. Three things do not come free. que can never be dropped, where English that is optional almost everywhere. The shift is decided by the reporting verb alone, not by whether the statement is still true, so the English licence to say he said he is tired does not exist here. And a reported order becomes de plus an infinitive, with a preposition English does not use.

When two verbs meet in French the second one is an infinitive, which is simpler than English, where it might be a bare infinitive (I can go), a to-infinitive (I want to go) or an -ing form (I stopped going). The whole difficulty is what sits between: je veux partir, but je commence à partir and je décide de partir. Nothing, à or de — it hangs on the first verb and cannot be worked out, only learnt. The one thing to unlearn before starting: English to is not French à. It looks like a translation and it is not one, and taking it for one is what puts à in front of half the verbs that want de.

English has silent letters too — knight, through, debt — but they are accidents stuck to individual words, and no English spelling ever hides a whole plural or a whole verb ending. French does exactly that. Il parle and ils parlent sound identical; ami and amis sound identical; parlé, parler and parlez sound identical. The grammar is in the writing and not in the sound. And it works the other way round as well: the liaison brings a silent ending back to life in front of a vowel, so things are heard that are not obviously there. Reading alone leaves you unable to follow a conversation; listening alone leaves you misspelling every other sentence.

Nothing here decides a sentence and all of it decides the impression. c'est and il est both come out as it is or he is in English, and they stand in different places; tout is an adjective in one line and an adverb in the next, and its ending follows; and French punctuation puts a space in front of the doubled marks, where English puts none. The one that gives English speakers away fastest is the capital letter: English capitalises Monday, March, French and German, and French capitalises none of them.