6.1 Greetings and tu versus vous — Epoché
What you will be able to do Choose between the two French words for you before you open your mouth, using a short list of questions about the person in front of you rather than guesswork. Greet someone at any hour with the right one of the three everyday greetings, and know which of them you may say to a stranger and which you may not. Ask someone's name and give your own in both registers, and answer the question that always comes straight back at you. Recognise the moment when a French speaker offers to move from the formal form of address to the familiar one, and know what you are expected to say. Close a conversation, which in French normally takes two moves rather than one. Sentences from this lesson, before the explanation. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Bonjour Monsieur ! [1] Hello sir! Bonjour Mesdames ! [2] Hello, ladies. Prerequisites : 5.2 and 4.2 — you need the words for family and people from the first of those and the way gender works from the second, because a polite French greeting nearly always carries a title, and the title has to match the person standing in front of you. See 5.2 Vocabulary and 4.2 Grammar if either of them is missing. This is the first of eight conversation lessons in this run (6.1 to 6.8), and all eight are built the same way. Every line of every dialogue is a sentence somebody really wrote, taken from the corpus and quoted unchanged, so what you learn here is what people actually say rather than what a textbook thinks they ought to say. The commentary between the dialogues is where the pattern is explained, and the tables collect the fixed phrases so that you can find them again quickly. Who is speaking to whom French has two words for you , and there is no neutral third option. tu is for one person you are close to or clearly senior to: a friend, a child, a relative, an animal, a colleague of your own age in a relaxed office. vous is for everyone else in the singular — strangers, shopkeepers, officials, teachers, anybody older, anybody in a position of authority — and it is also the only form for more than one person, however well you know them. In the two dialogues below, the first pair are colleagues of the same age who have worked together for years, so they use tu throughout. The second pair have never met, one of them is a visitor and the other is receiving him in a place of business, so they use vous from the first word to the last. The main difference between the two dialogues is the choice of tu or vous , and the register it implies. The safe rule for a beginner is short and worth memorising: use vous with every adult until that person invites you to do otherwise. Over-formality in French is a very small mistake, the sort of thing that makes a French speaker smile and then offer you the familiar form. Under-formality is a real one. Addressing a shopkeeper, a receptionist or a police officer with the familiar form is not warm, it is rude, and it is the single most reliable way for a foreigner to give offence without meaning to. English has one word here, and French has two English lost this distinction and forgot that it ever had it. Older English had a familiar singular and a formal plural, and the familiar one survives in scripture and in Shakespeare. Modern English merged them, so a single word now does the work of both, and the choice that French forces on you is a choice English speakers never have to make. That is why beginners feel ambushed by it: it is not a harder version of something they already do, it is a decision with no English counterpart at all. English carries politeness in the length of the sentence; French carries it in the form of address. An English speaker who wants to be polite adds words: I was wondering whether you might possibly . A French speaker who wants to be polite has usually done most of the work already by choosing the formal form and adding a title. This means that an English sentence translated word for word into French often sounds elaborate and faintly comic, while a short French sentence that would read as curt in English is perfectly courteous. English has one all-purpose greeting; French divides the day. Hello works at any hour and in any register. French makes you pick, and the wrong pick is noticeable. The first greeting below covers the whole daylight period and is the one to use with anybody at all. The second is familiar only, and using it to a stranger behind a counter is a small social error. The third belongs to the evening, and the boundary is roughly the point at which the working day ends rather than any particular hour on the clock. English uses a title far less than French does. An English speaker greets a shopkeeper with hello and nothing else. In France the bare greeting sounds abrupt in a shop, and the title is added as a matter of course, with no name after it. Learning to attach the title automatically is one of the cheapest ways to sound polite in French, because it costs one word and no grammar. The three greetings, and the two ways out Read the table across. The right-hand column is the thing to learn, because the English glosses hide the difference: three of these rows come out as hello or good evening in English while doing three different social jobs in French. French English When you use it Bonjour Monsieur ! [1] Hello sir! the default, with a title and no name; all daylight Bonjour Mesdames ! [2] Hello, ladies. the same, to a group of women Salut, Lisa ! [3] Hello, Lisa! familiar only; never to a stranger behind a counter Bonsoir monsieur ! [4] Good evening, sir! from the end of the working day, on arriving and also on leaving Bonne nuit ! [5] Goodnight. on leaving, late; not a greeting Au revoir ! [6] Good bye! the neutral farewell À bientôt ! [7] See you soon! when you expect to meet again soon Bonne journée ! [8] Have a nice day! the second move out, after the farewell Two things about the bottom of that table. First, the greeting for t