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On any given day, you have many opportunities to ask questions:
“May I have a glass of water?”
“What’s up, Émil?”
“May I sit here?”
You probably don’t think about it, but a huge portion of your social interactions are based on questions and answers. This portion grows when you’re in a foreign country where you need to learn the social rules and make sense of new places and a new language.
In this lesson, you will learn different ways of asking questions and using interrogative expressions in French. Watch the following video to preview the basic rules for questions in French.
Bonjour!
What’s your name? How are you? What’s the weather like today?
A big part of human social interaction is asking and answering questions. Do you know how to ask a question in French? Keep watching to learn how!
In French, there are three ways to ask a question: intonation, est-ce que, and inversion. Let’s briefly talk about each one.
Intonation is when you change a statement to a question by raising the pitch of your voice at the end. Repeat this statement after me:
Vous parlez français.
Très bien. Now, let’s make that a question:
Vous parlez français?
Do you hear the difference?
Another way of asking a question in French is by using est-ce que. Like the upside down question mark at the beginning of a question in Spanish, est-ce que tells you that a question is coming. Let’s look at this statement again:
Vous parlez français.
To turn it into a question, you can put est-ce que at the beginning and add a question mark at the end.
Est-ce que vous parlez français?
The third way of asking a question in French is the most formal. It’s called inversion. With inversion, you switch the places of the subject and the verb and put a hyphen between them. Look at our example statement:
Vous parlez français.
With inversion, this becomes:
Parlez-vous français?
Let’s look at another example:
Il aime voyager. He likes to travel
With inversion it becomes:
Aime-t-il voyager?
What is different about this question? When the verb ends with a vowel (aime) and the subject begins with one (il), you need to put a ‘t’ between them. Notice that a hyphen goes on either side of the ‘t.’
Interrogative expressions are words and phrases used to ask questions. These expressions help you ask more complex questions. Repeat after me.
Que [add brief pause after each word for student to repeat]
Qui
Quand
Où
Pourquoi
Comment
Combien de
With interrogative expressions, you can ask questions like:
Pourquoi parlez-vous français? Why do you speak French?
Qui parle français?
Who speaks French?
Où parlez-vous français?
Where do you speak French?
And many more!
Whew! That’s a lot. Let’s review, okay?
There are three ways to ask a question: intonation, est-ce que, and inversion. The statement ‘Vous parlez français’ can become
Vous parlez français ? (intonation)
Est-ce que vous parlez français ? (est-ce que)
Or
Parlez-vous français ?(inversion)
Question words help you to ask more complex questions. In English, these words are who, what, when, where, why, how, and how many. Examples are:
Comment étudiez-vous français? How do you study French?
Qu’est-ce que vous étudiez?
What do you study?
Repeat each question after me:
Comment étudiez-vous français?
Qu’est-ce que vous étudiez?
Très bien!
In this video, we’ve briefly talked about how to ask a question using intonation, est-ce que, and inversion. Keep following along with this lesson to learn more about asking and answering questions!
Bon travail!
What is the most informal way to ask a question in French?
- intonation
- inversion
- est-ce que
Correct!
Sorry that is not correct.
Sorry that is not correct.
Summary
Questions answered correctly:
Questions answered incorrectly:
