8 most important rules for beginners in French - French tips | The perfect French

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Perfect French with Dylan. Today on Tips Thursday, or Thursday Tips, I don't know, we're going to see the 8 most important rules about the French language when you start learning or maybe you already are in the learning process and you don't understand anything, most likely. So I have been teaching a lot of different people, a lot of different types of learners. I would say, you know, everybody is different. Some people are more a listening learner, others are more visual. It really depends on the person. Some of them are fast, some of them are not. Some of my students were 6 years old, other ones were 60. They all have the same question at the beginning. How can I study? Where do I start? Is there anything that can help me to understand better? And while I don't have, unfortunately, a miracle solution for you to learn faster, I can only give you tips that I already did actually, already 10 tips to learn French faster. But what I can do is summarize all the rules that you should know when you start. They're actually, all of them are on my videos already, but you don't have to watch them all because I'm going to summarize right now for the people who start learning or have already learned a bit. The first thing we're going to see is a noun. Feminine, masculine or neutral? So we can just answer one question right now. There's no neutral in French. We don't have that. Never. Either feminine, either masculine. The problem is there's no 100% rule to know what is feminine and what is masculine. Chair is feminine, a car is feminine, a boat is masculine. There's no rule technically to what is what is not, but I have a rule that works for feminine and masculine for 80% of the noun. So when a noun ends with a, 80% of the time it's going to be a feminine noun. And when a noun ends with c, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, x, z, it's going to be most likely masculine. But it's only 80% of the time, which is already quite good for French language because French language has so many rooms, an exception, an exception to the exception, that 80% is already quite good, but you still have to study for the 20 other persons. So you always have to study with the article. The article is, I was talking about the chair, let's say la chaise, la chaise. La is the article for chaise, chaise. So you have to study the article with the noun. Then you know if it's feminine or masculine. La is feminine, so you know that chaise is feminine. But if we take an example that is not ending with a, for example la souris, well 80% of the time souris should be masculine, but it's indeed feminine. And we know that because while studying you saw that it was la souris, so you know it's feminine. Never study a noun without the article, and then you should be good. Point number two, rule number two, the plural of noun. So it gets really complicated, the plural of noun, because sometimes there is no plural, sometimes a l becomes a e x. It's quite hard to know what is going on, but I have two rules for you to remember, and that will work for more than 85% of the time. So the 15% you can just manage as you go, as you learn English. So let's see those two. When a noun ends with e, c, d, f, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, t, we only add an s at the end. For example, une bouteille, deux bouteilles. We only add an s, we don't even pronounce it, so it's une bouteille, deux bouteilles. And the second part of this, rule number two, is when a noun ends with s, x, or z, then there is no plural at all, it doesn't change, because we never add another s to an s, an x, or a z. For example, une souris, deux souris, it doesn't change. There are other rules for that, for the plural of noun, I invite you to watch the video if you want to know more. For now, you already know that 85% of the time, it's going to work like that. Rule number three, un ou n'ouf, un ou n'ouf. This one can seem tricky, but it's really simple to use. We simply use it like we use we in English, n'ouf. It's a more casual way to talk. We also write like that, but don't write with un on any academic paper or anything like that, this is not good. When you text your friends, your family, you send an email to your co-worker, you can easily use un. Let's see some examples. Or we can contract it and say, It can also be used as one in English. For example, one can enjoy the culture while traveling. So two ways, casual or to replace one. Rule number four, il plus elle égale il. For some reason, my young students really have trouble with that. I don't know why, but they did not understand that even if I have, I don't know, so four feminine and one masculine, well, it's going to be all masculine. I don't know why they could not understand that because as you see in English, it's So you don't have that thing in English when you have to choose between masculine and feminine. So they were really lost with that. Let's look at that sentence. So la souris, because the article is la, we know it's a feminine word. La bouteille, feminine word as well. So if you want to replace those three by a subject pronoun, well, it's going to be il. Even though it's feminine, masculine, it's still going to be il. So elle, pluriel, it's only, only when it's elle plus elle. Rule number five, we don't pronounce everything. And I don't know if it's a surprise for you. People know we don't read the same way that we talk. We don't write the same way that we talk. Sorry. It is such a big topic, pronunciation, that I think I have three videos about pronunciation. I will put a little area on the description box for the pronunciation so you can see. There is one video about the alphabet and two videos about the pronunciation. You also have all the time the PDF on my website and they're all available all the time. So you can go grab them even if it was a lesson weeks and weeks and weeks before. So what I want to address on this rule number five is les lettres muettes. That's the one that we do not pronounce, the letter that we do not pronounce. And lucky you, they're always at the end of the word. It's a bit more complicated, but you can start with those three points and you will already know a lot. When a word ends with e, p, d, t, s, x, z, we don't pronounce those letters. Never. Second one, when a word is plural, well it will end usually by s or x, then we don't pronounce the plural. And the plural of the verb e and t, we don't pronounce it either. So that's the three points to begin with the pronunciation. So let's see some example here. If we look at le téléphone, le téléphone. Well, I don't pronounce the e. I don't say le téléphone. I just cut the word after the n. Le téléphone. Let's keep le téléphone. Un téléphone, deux téléphones. Well, I still pronounce it the same. I still don't say deux téléphones, and I certainly not say deux téléphones. We don't say, no. Deux téléphones. And the plural of verbs, if I say qui talks, they talk, you're going to hear exactly the same. Because it's il parle, il parle. We don't even know if the pronoun subject is different or not, because we never end with an s. So we pronounce it the same way. If it's singular or plural, il parle, il parle. Rule number six, we link words. And I think if you watch my video, you probably know it from now, but I still put it in this video because I come back to that a lot on my video. Every time I link two words in a video, I explain why. Because it's really important. It's a big part of the French spoken language, I would say. When a word ends with a consonant and the next one starts with a vowel, we're going to link them. Let's see some examples so you understand better. For example, if I take elle a. She has. There's no link. Elle a. But if I take the plural of elle a, so they have, we pronounce it like that. Okay. We don't pronounce the t-i-d-n because it's une lettre muette. Elles ont. We're going to see another one. Okay. And rule number seven for pronunciation. The third point of the pronunciation is that we pronounce everything by sound. We don't pronounce every letter. We talk with sound. So in English, it can be tricky. But mostly, it's going to be always the same. In French, depending on what letter goes together, it's totally different. I'm going to take the example that we already saw so you're not too lost. If we take le téléphone, le téléphone. Well, the ph becomes ph, le téléphone. Or if I take on, as we, vous, on, on. It's not on, it's on. And the last example for this rule, there's still one after. Let's take rendez-vous. And the rule number eight is about être et avoir. Even though we use them quite similarly. Is the word similarly? You know, in the same way. We use them the same way. We have three different ways to use them. The first one is going to be when you talk about your age. For example, I would say j'ai 31 ans, j'ai 31 ans. If I translate that in English, it would be I have 31 years old. Same thing if you want to say you're hungry or you're thirsty. When in English you used to be, we used to have j'ai faim, j'ai soif. And the same thing for to be cold or to be hot. So to be warm, j'ai chaud, j'ai froid. So we don't say I am cold. We say I have cold. If you already learned French, you have another rule that you want to share with other people. Please share it in the comments. It's always good to share your knowledge and every trick you use to learn French faster. You can subscribe to my channel. I post four times a week all those videos. So you have no excuse to not know what you want to study or what you have to study. You can just follow my video with a free PDF and you have your practice for the week. Don't forget to like this video. Leave a comment if you have a question. I'll be more than happy to help. You can follow me on my Instagram, my Facebook page, my YouTube channel, which is this one. You already know it. And I guess I will see you soon for another lesson.