Part I
Getting Started with French Grammar
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In this part . . .
Discover how to sound out French words.
Get the scoop on nouns, including their gender and the articles to use with them.
Match adjectives to the nouns they describe and place them properly in sentences.
Start counting with cardinal and ordinal numbers, and then talk about dates and times.
Chapter 1
French Grammar in a Nutshell
In This Chapter
Getting to know French parts of speech
Building and embellishing sentences
Moving through verb tenses and moods
French grammar is somewhat complex, and this book gives you plenty of material to dig into, little by little. I start you off easy in this chapter, providing an overview of what’s to come so you’ll feel a little more familiar with the topics throughout the book. If you take the time to read this chapter, you get a good grammar primer to help you through the journey you’re about to embark on.
The Parts of Speech
Learning a language is easier if you know what it’s made of. To grasp the fundamentals of any language, your native language as well as French, you need to recognize the parts of speech, the various types of words that compose a language and how they work. The following sections give you the scoop.
Nouns
You should know three essential things about a French
nom (
noun):
It refers to people, places, things, or concepts.
It has a gender (masculine,
he, or feminine,
she), and a number (singular or plural). You need to know the noun’s characteristics to make other elements of a sentence match it. That’s called
agreement in gender and number. It can have different roles (called
functions) in a sentence:
• It can be the subject of the verb, as the nou...