Intro to French

This is a beginning lesson I made for French.

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For absolute beginners!

--- Covering subject pronouns and their use, formal and informal versions of address, and grammatical gender. ---

Let's start with subject pronouns! Here they are in English and in French.

English	French
I	Je
You (informal)	Tu
You (formal)	Vous
He/She/It	Il/Elle
We	Nous
You (plural)	Vous
They	Ils/Elles

Now, in addition to il/elle for he/she, we also have "on." "On" can mean different things (that are pretty much all related though), depending on the context.

1) it can mean "we."
2) it can mean the general "one", as in "one must not try to breathe under water, or they will drown."
3) just like the "one", it can mean "people" in general, like "people must not try to breathe under water..."  

Note: If you know German, it is comparable to "man." (Like "Man kann nicht unter dem Wasser atmen.")

You may be wondering what  the equivalent for "it" is in French. Well, since French is a language that has grammatical gender (masculine/feminine), "il" is often used as "it" when "it" refers to things of masculine gender (physical or grammatical) and "elle" works the same way, but for feminine gender things. We'll get to gender at the end of this lesson though.

So, on to the next explanation!

You may have noticed that we have "you (plural)" on the chart. This is because French distinguishes between talking to one person and calling them "you" and talking to more than one person and also calling them "you." In English sometimes we try to make up for our lack of a word for it and say "you guys" or "y'all" to mean "you" when talking to a bunch of people. French has solved this problem, and they say "vous" to mean this.

You probably also noticed that we have "formal" and "informal" next to the different ways of saying "you." French does this to be polite. So when should you use them?

(And yes, the plural "you" and the formal "you" are the same!)

Tu is used:

        - when talking to family and friends (and pets and inanimate objects...also in Christianity to address god)
        - adult to child dialogue (unless there's a special circumstances which demands "vous" be used)
        - between students, kids, and young children when talking with each other
        - a lot of the time online in chats and such
        - to be disrespectful to someone in a situation where you would use "vous"
        - also, younger employees tend to use "tu" with each other more than older ones (so a bunch of 25 year olds would be more likely to address each other with "tu" than a bunch of 50 year olds would.)

Note: Some businesses advocate the use of "tu" amongst their employees, and the usage of "tu" is acceptable in more situations now than it has been in the past.

Vous is used:

        - students to teachers
        - teachers to older students to distance themselves from their pupils
        - people who have just met (sometimes with new business partners, strangers on the street, ect.)
        - to someone of authority to be respectful
        
When you aren't sure if you should use "tu" or "vous," it's generally a good idea to use "vous."

Sometimes people may ask you to start addressing them with "tu" after you've known each other for a while, or, they might not. Or they may address you with "tu" but they expect for you to talk to them with "vous." So it's important to be aware of the "tu" vs "vous" distinction and its rules.

Remember! If you are talking to a bunch of people, use "vous" because it's more than one person, even if you would address them all individually with "tu."

Intro to Grammatical Gender

As I mentioned before, the French language has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. (The gender is pretty arbitrary for most things by the way; there's no reason why the sun is masculine and the table is feminine, it just happens.) All nouns have genders, and since articles, adjectives, and some pronouns and verbs must agree with somethings gender, they are very important to know.

The definite articles are words that point to a specific something, they basically are the word "the". They are as follows:

Le - masculine, singular
La - feminine, singular
Les - plural for masculine and feminine

The indefinite articles are words that point to a more general and non-specific thing, like the words "a" and "an" in English. They are:

Un - masculine, singular
Une - feminine, singular
des - plural for masculine and feminine

When you make French vocabulary lists, it is always extremely important to write the grammatical gender with your nouns.

La pomme - the appleLa voix - the voice
Le chien - the dog
Le choléra - the cholera
Some nouns are completely different depending on which gender you use, so be careful!
La livre - pound (monetary unit, or of mass)
Le livre - book

La manche - sleeve/English Channel
Le manche - handle


Le rose - pink
La rose - rose

La voile - sail
Le voile - veil

Now it's time for some special rules. Whenever you have a word that starts with a vowel or an 'h' and you want to put "le" or "la" in front of it, you do this:

La inondation --> L'inondation  (flood)
Le abricot --> L'abricot  (apricot)
Le homme --> L'homme  (man)

When we are reading, we don't say "le abricot" either, we string it together so it sounds just as we write it, like "l'abricot."

Remember that gender is very very important! Seriously, I'm not joking. Once, one of my French teachers from Belgium had her step dad come over and visit her when she was living in France, and she asked him to go buy some bread one morning. He tried to buy it but the woman at the bakery pretended not to have any bread because he asked for "un" instead of "une" baguette, and after that, he tried to buy some pastries but she wouldn't let him buy those either and pretended not to listen to him half the time. So remember your grammatical genders, it will help you buy stuff and not get ignored! :)

Later, I will make lessons getting into how verbs and adjectives and other things are affected by the genders of nouns. 
 
Happy studying! 

- by A. T. Klein