As you may know, I've been teaching French for over 10 years and it's always a pleasure to help students achieve their goals. As you can imagine, I've learned a lot from my students and realized a number of things about the French language, I've kind of rediscovered my language. In this video, I'd like to share with you 4 fun and, above all, surprising facts about the French language. Among them, there's one that's never been mentioned in other videos on Youtube. So stick around until the end to find out all about them.
It's common knowledge that the French are big grumblers, that they never stop pestering-not stinking, though, no, pester, i.e. expressing their discontent-in short, they're always negative. And perhaps there's a grammatical reason for this... ne-ga-tions!
Do you know how many negations there are in French? 2, 3, 4? More than that!
I can name at least 8, some of which are no longer used!
Now let's talk about adjectives, which change their meaning depending on their place in the sentence. You're probably familiar with the general rule: the adjective follows the noun, except for BANGS (beauty, age, number, goodness, size). If we stopped there, it would be too easy, so let's complicate things a little.
Let's take the adjective grand. It's part of a special list of adjectives that can be placed before or after the noun, but beware of the meaning: a tall man is not necessarily a tall man, and vice versa, unless we're talking about Charles de Gaulle. Un homme grand, a tall man, un grand homme, a great man.
Here are a few more examples. I've chosen 3 of the most common adjectives for this video.
How many times have I been asked “Jérôme, how do you say cheap in French?” No idea, it doesn't exist since everything is expensive in France (its sadness) but recently I got fed up and decided to do some research! There used to be a word for it, and one expression has survived in its original form
Want to know more about French language, take French lessons with me!
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