Topic Six (1.6): Le français à la loupe

Read Icon.png Reading

Read pages 16 and 17 of your coursebook and complete Exercises 1-4. If you need assistance translating the text or understanding how to complete the tasks, please read the instructions below.

Grammar Icon.png Grammar

Note that an ‘emphatic pronoun’ is used to emphasise who does/did something, so ‘Moi, je...’ means ‘Me, I’ as in ‘Me, I like ice-cream’.  Often, it will be followed by a contrast, so for instance you could say ‘Moi, j’aime le poulet, mais lui, il aime le porc rôti’ – Me, I like chicken, but him, he likes roast pork.

ONLY REFER TO THE INSTRUCTIONS BELOW IF YOU REQUIRE ASSISTANCE WITH YOUR EXERCISES

Pages 16 and 17

This section is where you get to practise the grammar you have come across in the earlier sections of this module.

Read the first paragraph.  To help you with the language used, note the following words and their meanings:

  • neutre – neutral
  • terminaison – ending
  • conseils – advice

Exercise 1. ‘conjuguer’ means ‘to conjugate’ and it is how you form the different parts of a verb e.g. je joue, tu joues, il joue etc.

Exercise 2. If you are studying alone, simply recite the whole of the verb and try to learn it off by heart.

Exercise 3. In the explanation of when to use the present tense, note that C ‘Je fais mes devoirs depuis quatre heures!’ means ‘I have been doing my homework for four hours’ – notice that in English we use a different tense (the past continuous) to the tense used in French (the present).

Exercise 4.

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‘le sujet’ here means ‘the subject’. Note that this is NOT a school subject but a grammatical ‘subject’ i.e. the person (or thing) who does something. Note that the grammatical ‘object’ is the person (or thing) which has something done to it.