4.1 Word order — and where French differs from English — Epoché
What you will be able to do Recognise that the backbone of a French sentence is the one you already use every day — subject, then verb, then object — and stop translating word by word because of it. Put an ordinary descriptive adjective where French wants it, which is after the noun, and read a noun phrase in that order without stumbling. Place a short adverb in the three positions French allows, and in particular put it directly after the verb rather than in front of it. Say, for any of these three patterns, what English would do instead — which is the fastest way to stop making the mistake. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Ana adore le chocolat. [1] Anna loves chocolate. Elle adore le café. [2] She loves coffee. Elle achète l'ordinateur. [3] She is buying the computer. J'ai une voiture rouge. [4] I have a red car. Prerequisites : 3.2 — you should already be able to conjugate the present tense of the commonest verbs and recognise a subject pronoun when you see one, since every example here has a finite verb in it. See 3.2 Conjugation if you need it. This is the first lesson of the grammar volume, and it starts with the largest piece of good news in the whole course. The order in which French assembles a clause is, in the great majority of cases, the order English uses. You do not have to rebuild your sense of where things go. What you have to do is learn three local differences, each of them small, each of them extremely frequent, and each of them the kind of thing that marks a sentence as foreign the instant you get it wrong. That last point is worth dwelling on. A learner who says a car red in English is understood perfectly and sounds foreign for the rest of the conversation. The same is true in reverse: word order is not where meaning usually breaks down, it is where fluency shows. So treat this lesson as a habit-building lesson rather than a comprehension lesson. You will understand the examples immediately. The work is in producing them in the right order without thinking. One more framing remark before we start. Everything in this lesson is about neutral , ordinary order. French, like English, can move things around for emphasis, and you will meet those moves later. When a rule below says after the noun or after the verb , read it as where it goes unless you are doing something special . The skeleton you already own A plain French statement puts the subject first, the conjugated verb second, and whatever the verb acts on third. No inversion, no verb at the end, no case endings to work out first. If you can read the English gloss of the three sentences below, you can already read the French. French English Ana adore le chocolat. [1] Anna loves chocolate. Elle adore le café. [2] She loves coffee. Elle achète l'ordinateur. [3] She is buying the computer. Three things are worth noticing here, none of them about order. First, the article is not optional: where English says loves chocolate with a bare noun, French says the equivalent of loves the chocolate , and the article is the price of admission. That is the subject of the next two lessons. Second, the third sentence translates as a progressive, is buying , although the French verb has no progressive form at all in the simple present; one present tense covers both English presents. Third, and most importantly for today, you did not have to do anything with the order. It was already right. Because the skeleton is shared, the sensible strategy for the rest of this volume is to assume French does what English does, and to learn the exceptions as a short list. The list is not long. This lesson gives you two items from it; negation and questions, which are the other two big ones, come in the last two lessons of this run. How English does it Here is the whole lesson from the English side, in one place. Read it before the sections that follow and again after them. The subject and the object. English and French agree. Both put the doer before the verb and the thing done to after it, and both rely on that order rather than on endings to tell you who did what to whom. The dog bites the man and the man bites the dog differ in English only by order, and the French equivalents differ only by order too. This is not a small coincidence: it means that the single most important grammatical resource you have as an English speaker transfers directly. The adjective. English has one position for an adjective that modifies a noun directly: in front of it. A red car , an interesting book , a dark night . English does have adjectives after the noun, but mostly in fixed phrases borrowed from French or from law, such as attorney general or time immemorial , after words like something ( something new ), and in the special case where the adjective drags a phrase behind it, as in a book interesting enough to finish . For everyday purposes, English puts the adjective first and that is that. French does the opposite for most adjectives, and this is the difference you will feel every time you open your mouth. The adverb. This is where English is the odd one. English likes to slot a short adverb of frequency between the subject and the verb: she often helps him , he always wins , I never smoke . French does not allow that slot for these adverbs at all. The adverb comes after the verb. On the other hand, when there is an object as well, English pushes the adverb to the end — I speak German well — while French keeps the adverb next to the verb and lets the object come last. So the two languages disagree twice, in opposite directions, and the fix in both cases is the same: keep the adverb glued to the verb. What English does that French also does. Both languages happily put a time word at the front of the sentence, with or without a comma, and both treat that as ordinary rather than literary. Yesterday it rained and Today I am tired work in both. So the one adverb position you alrea