Verbs and the Present

Hey everybody!
I'm no French teacher, it's true, but I think it would be good to get some posts on here that seek to cover some of the basics of French grammar, to help explain some of my other posts further down the line! Today, then, I want to briefly cover the Present Tense, which will hopefully provide a useful basis for more to come!

The Present Tense is, unsurprisingly, the verb tense that is used when talking about actions that occur in the present. Verbs, as you may well know, are the words that explain actions, and usually follow the pattern of "to x" - such as, to do, to be, to have, to go, etc. In French, verbs are conjugated - that is, given a different form - depending on the person doing the verb (the subject) and the tense or mood, such as the past, the present, or the conditional. It's something that doesn't really get talked about in English; for instance, we don't really think of the differences between "I am" and "You are" in relation to the verb "to be", but it's a very important idea to grasp in order to follow in French.

Verb Conjugations
In French, there are two types of verbs - regular (following a pattern) and irregular (following little or no pattern) - that are spread through three groups. These groups are helpfully called first, second, and third group. First Group verbs all end in "-er" and are regular; Second Group verbs end in "-ir" and are also regular; while Third Group verbs are all irregular, and a lot of them end in "-re". Let's look at this in action, demonstrated with the three regular verbs, regarder (to watch), finir (to finish) and descendre (to go down):

These kinds of verb tables are sort of the bread and butter of learning French, so there'll be plenty of these things coming out on this blog!

For all regular verbs, whether they're "-er", "-ir" or "-re" verbs, they drop those suffixes and then add the endings that you can see in the above table.

The problem comes with the Third Group, with the irregular verbs that you come across. You see, irregular verbs are some of the most common, most useful verbs in the language. In particular, avoir (to have) and être (to be) are perhaps the most important verbs in the dictionary, and really ought to be learned by heart!

Aside from être, which is wholly irregular in every tense due, in part, to the fact it has partially evolved from the Latin stare, all of these verbs do have an element of regularity when you compare them to others. Look, for instance, at the bottom line of the above table - we've got vont, ont, sont and font, all fairly similar, no? A lot of irregular verbs still follow a pattern, it's usually just a matter of trying to find it. For example, pouvoir (to be able to) has the same pattern as vouloir (to want) and devoir (to have to). So there are degrees of regularity, even within the irregular verbs!

Using the Present Tense
So that's how the present tense is formed, but what is it used for? Well, more than you might think.

In addition to present actions, or states of being, the French use the present tense to explain immediate future actions. For example, if you want to say "I'm working tomorrow", you would use the present tense, "je travaille demain". This example also leads me on to the other use for the tense - the present progressive.

In English, the present progressive "I am - ing" is used fairly often, whereas it doesn't really exist in French. There is the expression "être en train de" which means "to be in the process of", but that is only used to emphasize the point that you are doing something. To say "I'm reading a book", you would use the present tense, "je lis un livre".

Finally, the present tense is used with "depuis" (for, since) to explain an action that began in the past continues into the present. You'll see an example of this in my last blog, as it happens! In that post, you'll see that I talk about how long I have worked for the civil service with the phrase "je travaille là depuis dix-sept ans", which means "I have worked there for seventeen years". So it's a past tense phrase in English that is expressed through the present tense in French, through the use of "depuis".

Confusing stuff, but it's all part of the joy of learning French!

Bonjour!

Hello everyone!
So here we go, the first step on my road to fluency! Well, sort of.

For this week's blog, I'm capitalizing on the fact that this is a new series, so I thought I'd write a little introduction for myself, then go through and explain what it all means. Talking about yourself is also a staple of language exams, of course, so it's all useful stuff!

Bonjour! Je m'appelle Mark. 
J'ai trente-cinq ans, et j'habite à Bicester. Je suis né à Witney, et j'habitais là jusqu'à l'année dernière. 
Je suis marié, et ma femme s'appelle Jemma. Nous avons une fille, qui s'appelle Phoebe, qui a presque sept mois. Elle n'est pas de tout repos, mais tout de même nous l'adorons. 
Je suis fonctionnaire. Je travaille à Oxford. Je travaille là depuis dix-sept ans. Il paie bien, mais je ne l'aime plus - il m'ennuie aujourd'hui.

So here we go!

For my first entry on a learning French blog, this is fairly complicated stuff. We've got three tenses, with a variety of uses of pronouns, adjective agreements, pronominal verbs, negation and idioms. Having been over it a couple of times, I think it's all correct, but if you know better, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know!

J'ai trente-cinq ans, et j'habite à Bicester. Je suis né à Witney, et j'habitais là jusqu'à l'année dernière.
This opening is probably the most complicated, as we've got three tenses on show - the present tense, the past-perfect tense (passé composé) and the imperfect tense. To start with, "J'ai" (I have) is the correct way to give your age - you're saying "I have x years" rather than "I am x years old". In my case, I have 35 years under my belt! "J'habite à" is how you say where you live - you use the preposition à when talking about being in a town, as is the case here.

"Je suis né" is our first taste of the past tense - the passé composé. Grammatically speaking, a "perfect" action is a completed one, and so the passé composé is the perfect past, because it describes an action that happened once, at a definite moment in time, and is now complete. I should probably think about a separate post about this, but anyway! For now, "je suis né" translates to "I was born", though don't dwell on the fact that there is a "was" in there!

"J'habitais" is our second past tense, the imperfect. If a perfect action has happened and is over with, an imperfect action is one that took place over a period of time in the past (but has now finished). It is therefore used with habitual or continuous past actions, and often equates to the English "was" (which is why I said not to dwell on the earlier translation!) "J'habitais là" means "I lived there", the implication being the action (living) was habitual.

Je suis marié, et ma femme s'appelle Jemma. Nous avons une fille, qui s'appelle Phoebe, qui a presque sept mois. Elle n'est pas de tout repos, mais tout de même nous l'adorons. 
So here, I talk a little bit about the family! I am married with a baby daughter, who is almost seven months old (at the time of writing!) I do like to throw in these odd words, like "presque" (almost) and "jusqu'à" (until) in the previous section!

We have an idiom next, "elle n'est pas de tout repos". It means, I am reliably informed, "she's a handful", though literally translated it comes out as "she is not all restful"! I love learning French idioms, as it makes me feel like I'm producing more authentic French. Another great idiom, which is fairly widely used from what I understand, is "tout de même", which means "all the same".

Finally, in this section, let's talk about pronouns! These little words stand in for nouns to avoid repetition in a sentence. Words like "it" in English have a whole plethora of variations in French, depending on the situation at hand. "Nous l'adorons" means "we adore her" - rather than saying "we adore our daughter" or similar, the "her" replaces the "our daughter". Pronouns are another topic that really need their own blog post, as there are all manner of different rules to be observed with their use, but here, I've replaced "notre fille" (our daughter) with "la" (her), which is a direct object pronoun, which then elides with the "adorons" because that word starts with a vowel. This blog is already getting fairly complicated, so I don't want to go too much into this now! This is definitely one of those areas where it becomes painfully apparent that, in order to learn a foreign language, you need first to understand your own on a much more visceral level!

Je suis fonctionnaire. Je travaille à Oxford. Je travaille là depuis dix-sept ans. Il paie bien, mais je ne l'aime plus - il m'ennuie aujourd'hui.
Here, I'm talking about my work ("travaille"). In French, a job title doesn't need an indefinite article before it, so when I say "I'm a civil servant", that is simply "je suis fonctionnaire" and not "une fonctionnaire". As an interesting aside, all French nouns are either masculine or feminine, and aside from a few obvious ones (such as "father" and "brother" being masculine, referring as they do to men), there is really very little rhyme or reason behind why they are masculine or feminine. The word for civil servant is "une fonctionnaire", and it doesn't matter whether the person is a man or a woman - it's the noun that matters. So while I am a man, my job title is a feminine noun!

Here's an interesting word: "depuis". It means "since" or "for", and that's how I've used it here - I have worked in Oxford for seventeen years. However, while in English we use the past tense, I have worked", in French, when you use "depuis", you need the present tense - in this case, "je travaille". It's another part of learning a language that is both fascinating and infuriating, as we often have such different ways of expressing ourselves!

Finally, I'm expressing my thoughts on the job - "it pays well, but I no longer like it - it bores me nowadays". We've got a bit of negation going on here - "je ne l'aime plus" ("I no longer like it"). To make a verb negative, you surround it with, generally, "ne ... pas", though there are a whole host of adverbs that you can use in the place of "pas" to give more information. Here, I've used "ne ... plus", which often means "no more", though can also mean "no longer".
For extra bonus points, I've also had another pronoun in there - rather than saying "I don't like the job any more", I have gone for "I don't like it", so using the pronoun "le" that then elides with "aime" as we saw earlier.

So there we are! My first entry on my journey to learning French. Like I said in my previous post, I do have some history with the language, so my first example of written French is fairly complex in grammatical terms, but I hope I've been able to explain things in as clear and concise a way as possible! If any of it has confused you, do let me now in the comments, and I'll seek to enlighten you! I'm not an expert - I'm still learning, too! - but I'm always keen to talk about this stuff!

I think I'm going to try to get a couple more blogs written soon, about some of the grammatical points that have already been thrown up in this post. Stay tuned for more!

Welcome!

Hello everybody!
It's post number one, the start of this exciting journey into the French language! Although, it's technically not *the start* for me. Back in 2003, I gained an A level in French at grade B, which wasn't too shabby considering that I'd been a bit of a slacker during my college years... However, I had always had a passion for the language, being immensely interested in learning French during the five years of high school where we were taught how to speak French. In the intervening years, though, all of that seemed to fall by the wayside, as life took over, and opportunities for speaking French dwindled to nothingness.

All that has changed for me, though, as I started back in the autumn of 2019 to re-learn the language, almost on a whim when I needed something to do when I was staying up with my new baby daughter. I found that I actually remembered more than I realized - particularly, things like pronunciation and grammatical points - so the task of learning anew wasn't quite as daunting as it might otherwise be! This has proven to be very helpful, of course, as I'm primarily using online sources to teach myself, and doing this can be quite difficult if you don't know if what that website is telling you is true.

My blog is not a language course - let's just get that out of the way here, now. I'm not going to claim to be able to teach you how to speak French, when I am, myself, still learning. However, I thought it might be interesting to present my own language journey in this form, and you can either follow along with me, or jump on each of my mistakes and judge me, as you see fit! Along the way, though, I'm sure there will be scope for mini-lessons, as I pass on to you guys what I have learned during the week. Hopefully, these will become more authoritative as time goes on!

The Goal
My aim with learning French is to become fluent - that should be everyone's aim with learning a language, I suppose! However, breaking that down into bite-size chunks, I'd decided that, if all I could do was write a couple of paragraphs on a Monday, detailing what happened at the weekend, that would be okay for now. From there, I'd decided that I want to take the series of DELF exams to demonstrate my growing proficiency. Even though I have the background with French as mentioned above, I'm still going to start at the bottom, with the A1 exam, as I want to get a feel for how that side of things works, as well as giving myself the most thorough grounding as I can.

So I guess there will be some sort of structure to my journey, as I progress through the syllabus there, but I do tend to learn things in a fairly haphazard way, coming across bits that interest me that are probably far above my current level! Learning a language is all about learning to express and communicate, though, and I am always trying to learn how to say what I want to say.

But I hope it will have a lot of interest, and will maybe even inspire you to learn the language, too! I'm intending to write a post at least once a week, where I look back at how I've been doing in that week, and what I've learned etc. Maybe, once this lockdown is over, I'll be able to pop across the Channel and visit France, trying out my newfound skills on the unsuspecting natives! Everything that I get up to with the language will find its way here, though, and I hope you find it interesting, maybe even a bit useful!

On y va!