Picture this: You’re going out with a group of native French-speakers. This is the perfect opportunity to make friends and practice your French in a real-life situation! But how do you break the ice?
The universal answer is to ask questions! Being able to ask questions in French will help you keep the conversation going. It will also make your new friends feel like you want to know more about them and that you value their opinions. Asking questions that you’re genuinely interested in will open a world of new information and cultural insight!
Okay, so now you know the importance of questions but how do you form them?
In French, there are three ways to ask a question:
- Intonation
- Est-ce que
- Inversion
Let’s talk a little more about each one.
Intonation is a very popular way of asking a question in spoken French, and it’s the simplest. When you are speaking, you just raise your intonation, or pitch, towards the end of the sentence. When you are writing, you add a question mark.
| Tu veux sortir avec nous ce soir? | You want to go out with us tonight? |
| Elle aime voyager? | She likes to travel? |
Est-ce que is unique among French expressions in that it doesn’t actually mean anything -- it’s just a way of turning a statement into a question, kind of like the word "do" in English. Like the upside-down question mark in Spanish, est-ce que signals that a question is coming. This is the most common way to ask questions when speaking.
Though est-ce que is widespread in spoken French, it’s much less common in writing because it’s slightly informal. If you’re in a formal situation, you should avoid it in favor of inversion, which you’ll learn about next.
| Est-ce que vous voulez danser? | Do you want to dance? |
| Est-ce qu’il va souvent à Londres? | Does he often go to London? |
Est-ce que is the inversion of c’est que, literally, “it is that.” Hence the hyphen between est and ce: c’est = ce + est is inverted to est-ce.
Inversion is the most formal way of asking a question in French, yet it’s still very much used, particularly in French-speaking African countries. It is also the most common form used to write a question. In inversion, you invert, or switch, the subject noun or pronoun and the verb and join them with a hyphen.
Basic sentence structure: subject + verb +
object
Inversion question structure:
verb-subject + object
| Parlez-vous français? | Do you speak French? |
| N’est-elle pas belle? | Isn’t she beautiful? |
If you use inversion with il, elle, or on and a verb that ends in a vowel, you need to add t between the verb and the pronoun. Notice that a hyphen is placed on either side of the t.
Structure: verb-t-subject pronoun + object
| Mange-t-on ici? | Do we eat here? |
Understanding how to ask questions is crucial to developing your foreign language skills. Questions allow you to ask someone their name or how they’re doing. They also allow you to get information from someone—like directions. Choose a couple of questions and practice writing them out using the three formats.
Language Note!
French has two different words for the English verb "to ask." To say that
you ask someone something, you use the verb demander. To
say that you ask a question, you use the verb poser. Look
at these examples.
Which question format is the most formal?
- intonation
- est-ce que
- inversion
Sorry that is not correct.
Sorry that is not correct.
Correct!
Summary
Questions answered correctly:
Questions answered incorrectly:
