Using the Grammar Notes   Words  Sentence Structure

Vocabulary is much more important for understanding French than grammar is.  If you understand the meanings of the words in a text, you can usually make pretty good sense of it without any grammatical knowledge.  However, when you get down to details, and want to be precise in your understanding, some grammatical knowledge is usually essential.  You need to know how the verb system works, so as to understand when something happened, or if it didn't actually happen, but just might have.  You need to know about word order so you can be sure when you read L'homme que mord le chien that the man isn't biting the dog.  about how Grammar can help you.

Using the Grammar Notes

To find a grammar topic, use the list on the left.  If you don't know the name of what you're looking for, come to this page and decide first if it's a word topic or if it has to do with sentence structure (the way words combine).  Then keep clicking to find what you need. 

On this page, very simple explanations are given.  You should understand the basic concepts. Use the questions to check your understanding. For more details, click on what interests you.

The icon (top of the blue sidebar) links to a full set of grammatical explanations provided by The Learning Company. These are very good, but as in most grammars, are intended for people who want to produce French as well as understand it, so a lot of the material is not necessary for you.

Words

Languages have various different sorts of words.  English and French usually use the same eight categories, which are known as the parts of speech.  For a very basic introduction to words, try the page on Content Words and Structure Words. 
 
 

The following categories apply to individual words: 
 

1. Give the name of a Part of Speech and an example of it.
2. How many Parts of Speech are there
3. Why is Tense important
4. What do you do when you conjugate a verb
5. What can you add on to a root to make a new word

Sentence Structure

1.Coordination and Subordination

When we talk about the way words are combined to make up a sentence or a phrase, we talk about them being coordinated or subordinated. 

Coordinated elements are of equal importance (in the table below, both are shown in red).  In subordination, one is more important (the head word or group or the main clause, shown in red) and the others are considered to depend on that word or group of words. 

 

	Coordination	Subordination
Single words	John and Mary  Big, bad John	My car  The blue car
Phrases	All the king's horses and all the king's men.	The beginnings of the war.
Clauses	John came in and then Mary left.	I believe that you are wrong.

  More on coordination and subordination. 

2.Simple Sentences 

Simple sentences are made up of two or more groups, or phrases.  Each group has a particular job or function in the sentence.  In the following table, the examples of the functions are shown in red. 
 

 
The usual order of these elements in English and French is Subject + Verb + Object.  When the subject comes after the verb, this is called Inversion. 

Simple sentences have only one conjugated verb.  All the sentences in the above table are simple sentences. 
 

3.Complex Sentences

Complex sentences combine two or more simple sentences together, usually - though not always -  using conjunctions or relative pronouns (shown in red). 
 

4.Other Sentence Structures

1. What words are coordinated in the sentence: "Il ouvre la porte puis il la referme derrière lui."

2. Does "La grande amie de ma grand-mère" contain a coordination

3. What is the subject of the sentence "Tous les enfants sont rentrés chez eux"

4. What is the function of "en hiver" in the sentence "Les oiseaux se cachent en hiver."

5. In the sentence "The key won't open the door", is the verb transitive or intransitive