#I understand in french how to#

It’s ideal if you intend to tell the native French speaker the specific part that you don’t understand. This French phrase is a variation of the more basic je ne comprends pas, which means “I don’t understand” in French. It means “I don’t understand everything.” If you understand some things but have a few doubts about parts of what someone has said, use je ne comprends pas tout. Literal meaning: I don’t understand everything Now that you know the literal translation, read on for a list of other variations and alternatives for saying “I don’t understand” in French.Īre any of these familiar to you? 1. This is the most direct and literal way to tell someone you don’t get it. “I don’t understand” in French is: je ne comprends pas.

#I understand in french how to#

How to say “I don’t understand” in French We’ll start with the simplest way and then cover alternatives/variations. If you’re drowning in French vocabulary and struggling to understand what someone says to you, use the phrases in this article to tell someone “I don’t understand” in French. Homophones are two or more words that sound the same but are spelled differently and mean something totally different, like date and datte.It’s not always easy to understand what someone’s saying in French if you’re just starting out. If you thought it was confusing that you drop half the letters when you’re speaking out loud, wait until you have to actually learn what order all the vowels in hors d’oeuvres go in. French spelling doesn’t follow a phonetic pattern. The flip side of having a language where the spoken language plays loose with the written language? The written language makes the spoken language look like child’s play. Je danse, tu danses, il danse, ils dansent - we all danse. French is confusing in that it both has a lot of verb tenses and also doesn’t really express them in spoken language because a lot of the conjugated forms sound sort of the same.

Okay, this one might be a bit of an exaggeration and arguably, this lets you get away with not always knowing your verb conjugations on the fly. A lot of the French you think is French isn’t actually French, and that brings confusion.Ī post shared by Babbel USA Verb conjugations are barely pronounced, either On top of that, you’ll probably also have to dig past an additional layer of unlearning all the Franglais you casually absorbed growing up. The word envie means something closer to “desire” than “envy,” and journée is not a “journey,” but rather a “day” (then again, is not each day a journey unto itself?). Not every word that looks familiar is familiar for the reasons you think they are. But this is one of those cases where “easier” becomes a lesson in “be careful what you wish for.”Īs English speakers, we’re constantly using words with French origins like “etiquette,” “sabotage” and “dentist.” But this can also lull you into a sense of false security as a French learner. You would think that would make things easier for someone with an English background. It’s estimated that around 30 percent of English words come from French. Anyway, this one probably messed with your head when you first learned it. Your English teacher growing up was all, “Don’t use double negatives.” Your French teacher is all, “You can’t properly negate a sentence unless you use two negative terms.” Usually, this requires a combination of ne (placed after the subject) and another negative after the verb, which is most often pas but can also be plus, rien, etc. And they certainly get what it means to stumble through copy-cat words that sound exactly the same but have totally different spellings and meanings. French learners know the pain of never-ending lessons in grammatical gender. French learners understand what it is to struggle through strange vowel sounds that are inexplicable in their spelling. And it’s only expected to keep growing at a rate that outpaces most others.Īnd yet - just because there are a lot of people in the same boat doesn’t mean that the boat doesn’t occasionally wobble and capsize. Beyond the sheer scale of French-speaking countries in the world (it’s an official language in 29 of them), French is also the second most-studied language in the world, after English.

Here’s the thing to understand about French learners: They are legion.