Below are the exercises which go with my post “Why Is the Wine Drinking Itself? Sticky Grammar Point #1”

I’ll put a link to that post at the bottom of this page. If you haven’t already, read it before doing these exercises.

Take your notebook, a scrap of paper or open a document on your laptop. Write down your answers, then compare them with the answers I give in the second section of this post.

Exercises

Exercise 1

First, revise your reflexive pronouns. Fill in the gap with the reflexive pronoun which matches the subject of each sentence. Some of these are reflexive and some are reciprocal (people doing something to each other). That’s fine—the pronoun is the same.

a. Je …. lève à six heures tous les matins.

b. Lucie …. lave les mains avant de manger.

c. Tu …. coiffes comme une ballerine.

d. Il …. couche très tard quand il regarde la télévision.

e. Vous …. rencontrez tous les soirs devant l’église.

f. Les garçons …. racontent des secrets.

g. Anne et Lisa …. parlent au téléphone.

h. Nous …. dépêchons pour arriver à l’heure.

Exercise 2

Transform the following active sentences into passive sentences using the pronominal passive.

Hint: you’ll need to ditch the agent. Nobody will know who is completing the action.

Make the object of the original sentence the subject of the new sentence.

Bonus points for translation!

Example:

Tu dois laver tes vêtements boueux après le match de foot.

becomes

Les vêtements boueux se lavent après le match de foot.

Translation: The muddy clothes must be washed after the football match.

a. Vous devez ranger les livres dans la bibliothèque.

b. Tu dois cuire le pain pendant cinquante minutes.

c. Les enfants doivent vider le lave-vaisselle tous les matins.

d. Tu dois mettre la glace au congélateur.

e. Au monastère, les moines chantent les prières cinq fois par jour.

f. En Italie, on mange partout la pizza.

g. Tu dois boire le café sans sucre.

Exercise 3.

What do you want to recommend to someone today? What instruction do you want to give? Write it in the comments using the pronominal passive.

SECTION 2:

The Answers

Exercise 1

a. Je me lève à six heures tous les matins.

b. Lucie se lave les mains avant de manger.

c. Tu te coiffes comme une ballerine.

d. Il se couche très tard quand il regarde la télévision.

e. Vous vous rencontrez tous les soirs devant l’église.

f. Les garçons se racontent des secrets.

g. Anne et Lisa se parlent au téléphone.

h. Nous nous dépêchons pour arriver à l’heure.

Exercise 2

a. Les livres se rangent dans la bibliothèque = The books should be / must be / are put away in the bookshelves.

b. Le pain se cuit pendant cinquante minutes = The bread should be / must be / is baked for fifty minutes.

c. Le lave-vaisselle se vide tous les matins = The dishwasher should be / must be / is emptied every morning.

d. La glace se range au congélateur = The ice cream should be / must be / is put in the freezer.

e. Au monastère, les prières se chantent cinq fois par jour = In the monastery, prayers are sung five times a day.

f. En Italie, la pizza se mange partout = In Italy, pizza is eaten everywhere.

g. Le café se boit sans sucre = Coffee should be / must be / is drunk without sugar.

Link to the post which prepares you for these exercises:

This article marks the beginning of a series on some sticky grammar points.

I would argue that grammar is the most interesting part of acquiring a new language. If you’ve been secretly enjoying this nerdier aspect of studying French, you’re in the right place. We’re about to go deeper.

Grammar is vital. Without it, all you have is floating vocabulary - words you know the meaning of but have no way to string together in a sentence, because, well, you got no string.

You’ll likely start with the basics: conjugation, pronouns, tenses etc.

Then, just when you think you’re getting to grips with it, you’ll hit a sentence like this:

Ce vin se boit très frais.

No complicated vocabulary. You translate it word by word. It should be simple.

This is what you get:

This wine drinks itself very cold.

Now, why would the wine go drinking itself? No really, why? Or even, how?

French is full of quirks like this.

They can be really discouraging. It just starts making sense, then it absolutely doesn’t.

I’m here to prepare you for the moments when the wine starts drinking itself. These tricky grammar points are often put in the “you don’t have to worry about that for now” box, but you will inevitably stumble across them at some point, unequipped and confused.

Today we’re going to look at what’s going on with the sentence structure in this strange sentence about wine, and I’ve prepared some exercises to help you get a firm hold on it.

So, ce vin se boit très frais. Let’s break it down.

You might recognise the little word se as a reflexive pronoun, as used with reflexive verbs.

You will have come across reflexive verbs quite early on in your French-learning journey because they are everywhere. A lot of basic things cannot be said without them, like getting up in the morning, washing yourself, or going to bed:

Je me lève

Je me lave

Je me couche

To understand our sentence about wine - and many others like it - you need to know that reflexive verbs are part of a bigger family of pronominal verbs.

Pronominal verbs do not all work the same way.

Here are two sentences which appear to have the same structure but which cannot be translated in the same way:

Le garçon se lave = the boy washes himself.

Le vin se boit ≠ the wine drinks itself.

Confusion arises when you know what a reflexive verb is (le garçon se lave, for example) and you try to apply this knowledge to all kinds of pronominal verbs.

Le vin se boit is a sentence which is using a structure called pronominal passive. It is not a reflexive verb, the wine (subject of the sentence) is not acting on itself, it is being acted upon.

Le vin se boit actually means the wine is drunk.

And there are not only reflexive verbs and pronominal passive verbs which use reflexive pronouns. There’s a bunch of other kinds too.

In the second section of this article, I will detail all the different kinds of pronominal verbs.

In this first section, we’ll focus on the pronominal passive.

A pronominal passive verb allows you to construct a passive sentence without an agent, without naming the person who is carrying out the action. So in the case of our wine, whoever’s drinking it conveniently remains anonymous.

This form often (not always) implies a recommendation or an obligation, like the temperature the wine needs to be drunk at.

In English, we might say, “this wine is best drunk very cold”, or “this wine should be drunk very cold.”

Note that these are verbs which in an active sentence are not necessarily pronominal. Their meaning doesn’t change by adding a reflexive pronoun to them, only the voice does, from active to passive.

Quick rule:

When you see se + verb and the subject is not doing anything, that’s likely a passive construction.

Note that the pronominal passive almost exclusively uses third persons, so if a subject pronoun is needed it will be il, elle, ils and elles, along with the reflexive pronoun se.

What is a passive sentence anyway?

In a passive sentence, the subject of the verb is undergoing the action of the verb. The subject is not doing anything.

Let’s look at drinking in an active sentence:

La femme boit le vin = the woman drinks the wine.

Here the subject is active, the woman is doing the drinking.

Now let’s flip it. We’ll turn it into a passive sentence. The wine becomes the subject. Here the construction is the same as in English:

Le vin est bu par la femme = the wine is drunk by the woman.

The wine is not doing any drinking, but it’s the subject of a sentence about drinking. It is passively being acted upon, by an agent, the woman.

Now let’s use the verb boire in a pronominal form, and remove the agent:

Le vin se boit = the wine is drunk.

And there you have it, the reflexive pronoun here doesn’t carry any particular meaning by itself, it is used to construct a passive sentence.

Here are some more examples:

La soupe se mange chaude = soup is eaten hot, or soup should be eaten hot.

Le magasin s’ouvre à neuf heures = the shop opens (is opened) at 9 o’clock.

Le livre se lit très facilement = the book is easy to read (is easily read).

La vaisselle se lave après chaque repas = the dishes are washed after every meal / the dishes must be washed after every meal.

👉 Key take-away:

Le vin se boit ≠ reflexive

It’s a passive construction.

Possible translations:

• The wine is drunk

• The wine should be drunk

• The wine is best drunk

Section 2

This bit is for readers who want to be really thorough.

It’s for the readers who read “there are several kinds of pronominal verbs” and want to know immediately what they are.

So, if you’re one of those bigger picture lovers, this bit is for you.

There are different ways to classify pronominal verbs, but here’s a practical breakdown:

• Reflexive verbs

• Reciprocal verbs

• Lexically pronominal verbs

• Inherently pronominal verbs

• Idiomatic pronominal verbs

• Passive pronominal verbs

You don’t need to master all of these today, but it’s fascinating to see just how important pronominal verbs are in French. I am going to define each one for you.

In my examples, I will alternate different persons - je, tu, il, elle, nous, vous, ils, elles - so you get used to working with their respective reflexive pronouns.

So first, here is a quick reminder of the reflexive pronoun for each person:

And now a quick definition of each kind of pronominal verb:

Reflexive verb

= a verb where the action is reflected back onto the subject.

Examples:

Je me lave = I wash myself

Tu te regardes = You look at yourself

Elle se peint = She paints herself

Il se parle = He talks to himself

Vous vous habillez = You dress yourself

Reciprocal verb

= a verb where two or more subjects act on each other.

Examples:

Jean et Marie se rencontrent = Jean and Marie meet each other

Vous vous parlez = You speak to each other

Nous nous appelons = We call each other

Les enfants se tapent = The children hit each other

Lexically pronominal verb and inherently pronominal verb

I’m lumping these two together because, for practical purposes, they can be considered the same.

These are a tricky concept for English speakers, because we don’t have an equivalent. With these verbs, the reflexive pronoun doesn’t have a reflexive meaning. The subject is not doing anything to itself or to anyone else.

These verbs don’t exist without their reflexive pronoun, or the pronoun-less version is obsolete (lexically pronominal verb = the pronoun-less version is obsolete or very rare. Inherently pronominal verb = the pronoun-less version doesn’t exist. You can forget this difference. You use them in the same way).

All you have to know is that you must NEVER separate these verbs from their reflexive pronoun. It’s a permanent fixture.

Examples:

Je me souviens = I remember

Les oiseaux s’envolent = The birds fly away

Il s’évanouit = He faints

Nous nous enfuyons = We run away

Ils s’abstiennent = They abstain

NB: When the verb begins with a vowel, reflexive pronouns ending in a vowel are elided. So s’ = se in s’abstiennent for example.

Idiomatic pronominal verb

= a verb which sometimes takes a reflexive pronoun and sometimes does not.

When it adopts a reflexive pronoun, its meaning changes.

As with lexically pronominal verbs and inherently pronominal verbs, the reflexive pronoun has no reflexive meaning, the verb is not acting on it.

Example:

Se rappeler

Without its reflexive pronoun, rappeler means call back.

With its reflexive pronoun, it means remember:

Je rappelle mon ami = I call my friend back.

Je me rappelle de mon ami = I remember my friend.

And last in the list was the pronominal passive, which you already know all about!

I have prepared some exercises for you to practise applying the pronominal passive.

You will find them just here:

Learning a new language is not just about learning new words and grammatical rules, it’s integrating new rhythms. And there’s something special about the rhythm of French. I’ll tell you what it is a little later, but first, let’s warm up with the more basic reasons why French flows like the Seine through Paris.

The role of vowels

Firstly, the summit of each syllable is a vowel phoneme. It’s the kernel, the beating heart, the part of the syllable which we hear clearly and accentuate, if accentuation is called for.

Secondly, French uses more open syllables than closed syllables. English, on the contrary, uses more closed syllables.

Closed syllables end with a consonant or a semi-consonant phoneme, open syllables let the air flow freely from your mouth till the end.

Take the word cat for example. In English, it’s closed - ends with your tongue against your teeth, blocking the air. In French, the t at the end of le chat isn’t pronounced, so the word ends with a vowel phoneme, [a]. It’s an open syllable.

Of course, a majority of open syllables creates a smoother sound overall than if you’re continuously ending your syllables with the harder, more divisive consonants. It’s one of the things that distinguish the almost liquid sound of French from more percussive languages like English.

Syllabification

Even in words with several syllables and a combination of vowels and consonants, French is pronounced in such a way that as many syllables as possible end on a vowel phoneme.

Example: cinéma

We divide this word into syllables as follows:

Ci | né | ma

As you can see, each consonant phoneme is used to begin a syllable, not end it.

If we use the letter C to represent a consonant phoneme, and the letter V to represent a vowel phoneme, we get the following pattern:

CV | CV | CV

It is incorrect to pronounce:

Cin | ém | a

CVC | VC | V

It is not possible to maintain CV | CV | CV in all words of course, but it is the dominant pattern.

Enchaînement and liaison

And there are very clever ways in which this pattern is maintained even across separate words. Enter enchaînement and liaison!

First, enchaînement:

Let’s look at the words ma petite amie (my girlfriend).

Here is how it is divided into syllables:

ma | pe | ti | te a | mie

CV | CV | CV | CV | CV

The te from petite comes together with the a from amie and is pronounced ta.

So, the word beginning with a vowel phoneme borrows (or steals, depending on the level of criminality we want to imply) the last consonant phoneme from the previous word to form a CV syllable.

That is enchaînement.

Liaison is very similar, only the words beginning with a vowel phoneme borrow consonants that are not usually pronounced.

Let’s look at my boyfriend now. No, not my actual boyfriend, sorry to disappoint…

Mon petit ami = my boyfriend.

Now, the last t of the word petit in its masculine form is not usually pronounced. So, its usual pattern as a standalone word is :

pe | tit

CV | CV

But, when it’s followed by a word beginning with a vowel phoneme, like ami, then that word wants its consonant, and it wants it pronounced.

So, here’s how we divide my boyfriend into syllables (again, not my real boyfriend, he’d never agree):

mon | pe | ti | t a | mi

CV | CV | CV | CV | CV

And that is how enchaînement and liaison maintain a majority of syllables beginning with a consonant phoneme and ending - open - on a vowel phoneme.

Note that the words involved have to be part of the same rhythmic group to be able to connect this way.

What’s a rhythmic group?

Ah, that’s where the real magic happens. It’s the real secret to the melodious flow of the language of love.

Rhythmic groups

Rhythmic groups determine on which syllable the stress falls in French.

Firstly, let’s remind ourselves how word stress works in English:

Pronounce - aloud if you can without looking weird - the word complicated.

Which syllable did you stress?

The first, of course, like you always do on this particular word: COMplicated.

Now try stressing the third syllable: compliCATed. Sounds completely wrong, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. The stress always falls in the same place in every word, wherever that word happens to be in a sentence.

Some words in English are spelt the same, but moving the stress around changes their meaning.

A REcord = noun

To reCORD = verb.

There’s nothing random or optional about it. Get the stress wrong and your word is mispronounced.

Now, in French, it’s a whole other system. It's a system which makes the words flow into each very smoothly, but, on the downside, makes the words a lot harder to distinguish from one another for learners. Sound familiar?

In French, the words of a sentence are bunched together in what we call rhythmic groups. A sentence can be composed of just one rhythmic group, but most often there are several.

And the stress will fall on the last syllable of a rhythmic group.

This means that a word does not possess its own stress pattern.

If you were learning English as a foreign language, you would learn the word complicated along with its stress pattern, COMplicated. This gives you an extra element to latch onto when you’re listening, and ups your chances of recognising the word.

French does not help you out in this way.

Here’s how it works:

The words of a sentence naturally group together in grammatical units. The groups will be smaller if you’re talking slower, and bigger if you’re rattling on at top speed. Your French teacher will divide their sentences up into smaller groups when they talk to you, to help you out.

Let’s divide a sentence up into rhythmic groups:

Mon petit ami | s’appelle Patrick, | et il porte un pantalon.

(My boyfriend - yes him again - is called Patrick and he is wearing trousers.)

How does this help us know which syllables to stress?

Well, this is the fascinating part. The syllable to stress is the last one of each rhythmic group.

And this syllable is stressed by lengthening it. So, each syllable is approximately the same length, except the last one of each group, which is perceptibly lengthened.

I will try to represent this visually:

Mon petit ami | s’appelle Patrick, | et il porte un pantalon.

DaDaDaDaDaaa | DaDaDaDaaa | DaDaDaDaDaDaDaaa

Mon petit amiii s’appelle Patriiick, et il porte un pantalooon!

To get the hang of the rhythm, you can try exaggerating it:

Mon petit amiiiiiii s’appelle Patriiiiiiick, et il porte un pantalooooooooon!

(Just don’t make a habit of it, you will get strange looks.)

The lengthened syllable is what helps you distinguish the rhythmic group when you’re listening, along with other aspects like intonation - the rise and fall of the voice.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If we add an extra word to the end of a group, the stress is displaced.

Let’s make his trousers blue.

Mon petit ami | s’appelle Patrick, | et il porte un pantalon bleu.

Now the lon of pantalon aligns with the length of all the other syllables in the group, and bleu is lengthened.

Mon petit amiii | s’appelle Patriiick, | et il porte un pantalon bleeeuu.

DaDaDaDaDaaa | DaDaDaDaaa | DaDaDaDaDaDaDaDaaa

And now you know why it’s so damn difficult to distinguish the words in a French sentence when you’re listening. They are not actually pronounced as separate words. In fact, a rhythmic group is referred to in French as a mot phonétique.

And what about those strong feelings?

Now, you may be wondering what to do if you want to accentuate a word in the middle of a rhythmic group, because you need to draw attention to that word. Like when you’re angry for example.

Well, this is possible too, but this is emphatic stress rather than the usual grammatical stress. It does not replace the latter but works alongside it. Emphatic stress typically falls on the first syllable of the accentuated word, and relies more on amplitude than duration, like when you’re REAlly angry:

Je suis VRAIment en colère !

So there you have it. The mechanisms of French melodic flow revealed. No romantic magic, just vowels, syllabification, and rhythmic groups of words that join together in one breath.

It takes some retuning for English-speakers’ ears to adjust. The more opportunities you have for listening the better: conversation practice, French films or immersion in a French-speaking country are all great opportunities for your ears to learn to divide the sounds of a rhythmic group into actual separate words with meaning, and turn the music into language.

Language learning is messy.

It’s embarrassing.

You have to put yourself out there, and speak an imperfect, sometimes weird, version of a language to people who speak it perfectly.

For perfectionists, it’s an excruciating process (I get it, I am one). And the tendency is to go back to the books and wade through grammar and vocabulary until you’re certain you’ve mastered it and will not be making a fool of yourself in the fromagerie.

But what if the imperfection is an essential part of the process?

What if hesitating on the shoreline with only your toe in the water is the thing holding you back from learning to swim?

Imperfection in language learning is not a problem, it’s a stage.

When you’re learning a new language, you speak a version of it which is uniquely yours. It’s called your interlanguage.

Your interlanguage is modelled by the distance between your mother-tongue and the language you’re learning, and by your own individual strengths and weaknesses.

It operates in close connection with the strategies you use to make yourself understood: gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc.

Let’s see what interlanguage looks like in action:

You’re in a small village in Normandy, and you’re marvelling at how the little specialised shops are still such a wonderful, integral part of the culture. An old woman is coming out of the boulangerie with the same crispy, fresh baguette under her arm she’s been buying every day for fifty years. The chef from the brasserie on the square is in raptures over a steak in the boucherie. And as you walk past the fromagerie, a shining red cheese wheel as big as a tire winks at you.

Do you dare? Do you dare go order a piece of that wheel in your imperfect French?

It’s looking at you and your mouth is watering, so you step in the shop and the fromagère stands imposingly, massive forearms crossed over a large, floral apron, looking at you expectantly, one eyebrow raised (yeah she’s terrifying).

‘Je voudrais… une pièce de ça, s’il vous plaît,’ you say, pointing (strategy) to the red wheel, and indicating (strategy) the desired thickness with your fingers.

She heaves the wheel onto the counter and seconds later a sizeable piece has been wrapped in paper and handed over to you. You pay and exit the shop triumphantly.

Did you speak perfect French? No (more about your mistake below).

Did you communicate that you wanted a piece of a specific kind of cheese? Were you understood? Did you get your cheese? Yes. Great.

Your interlanguage served its purpose.

And now, you can think about where you went wrong, and improve for next time. You wouldn’t be doing that if you hadn’t tried. The aim of language learning is to edge closer to the real thing, to lessen the gap between your interlanguage and the actual French or Spanish or Japanese or Indonesian you’re trying to learn.

Now, let’s look at what you could improve next time you ask for cheese.

We’re going to focus on translating the English word “piece”.

We use this word a lot: a piece of cheese, a piece of cake, a piece of music, a jigsaw piece, a piece of paper…

So, to translate all of these, we just need to find out how to say “piece” in French, right?

Wrong!

There’s a whole bunch of French words to choose from.

This is where immersion in the language helps, through time spent in conversation, in a French-speaking country, or just watching French films for example. That way, you learn which one sounds natural.

In the meantime, you can read about them here.

Here are a few ways to say “a piece” in French:

• Un morceau

• Une part

• Un bout

• Une pièce

Confusingly, “une pièce” rarely translates back to “a piece” in English.

So what do you say in the cheese shop?

• Un morceau de fromage.

Want to offer someone a piece of cake?

You got options:

• Un morceau de gâteau

• Une part de gâteau

• Un bout de gâteau (less formal)

A piece of music?

• Un morceau de musique

A jigsaw puzzle piece?

• Une pièce de puzzle

But what is “une pièce de théâtre?” A piece of theatre? No! A play, of course.

And, “elle attend dans une autre pièce”? She’s waiting in another piece? No! Another room, of course.

Let’s put it all into some nice clean tables.

Translating “a piece” into French:

Translating “une pièce” into English:

So no, you can’t say “une pièce de fromage” in the context described.

If you’re learning a language, you’ll be making lots of mistakes of this kind without realising it.

With perseverance and exposure to language spoken in real-life situations, they’ll iron themselves out over time.

In the meantime, notice where you’re successfully communicating your needs, your desires, your questions, your points of view.

When your interlanguage allows you to communicate, you’re succeeding.

In real life, it’s not always so black and white.

What do you do if you have French parents-in-law?

How about the student-teacher relationship?

And what do you make of the old man saying “vous” to someone when there’s no-one except his wife in the room?

I’ve often found myself in grey areas. It was never funny at the time. Hopefully my stories will make you smile now.

Traditional families

I first moved to France as a seventeen-year-old au pair. I found myself in a big old country house, in a rather traditional Catholic family. So traditional in fact, that the grandparents still said vous to each other, after some fifty years of marriage.

I was confused. And fascinated. I wondered, did they really use vous at all times? We can only imagine they did, although we’ll never know.

They were not the most laid back of people, and I found social interactions with the grandparents to be somewhat strained. It was during one such awkward interaction, when the grandfather stopped me in the middle of the grand main stairway, that I learnt the existence of the verbs vouvoyer and tutoyer - vouvoyer meaning “address a person using the pronoun vous” and tutoyer, the same with tu. I perhaps should have known these verbs. I only very recently, in watching the “word of the day” video on the dictionary website (what, you don’t watch those?) learnt that tutoyer has now been adopted as an English verb, meaning to speak to people in a familiar way. Anyway, I learnt it from the grandfather:

“Puis-je vous tutoyer ?” He asked me.

(“May I use tu with you?”)

Maybe he had asked his wife after all. Maybe she’d just refused.

Anyway, after establishing the meaning of the verb tutoyer I permitted him to use this more familiar form of address with me, and continued to address him with vous. After all, his own children and his son-in-law, now at least forty years old, still did that too.

It was my first lesson in how power dynamics affect pronoun choice.

Now, for your learning purposes, you should know that these are unusual choices. In most families, children say tu to their parents and grandparents, and couples say tu to each other.

Student-teacher relationships

During my time as an au pair, I took classes at a small provincial music school, where students and teachers all kissed each other indiscriminately on the cheeks in greeting and cheerfully used tu to everyone equally.

The year after, I attended a regional conservatoire. I felt fully equipped with my knowledge that music students say tu to their teachers. I walked confidently into my first violin lesson with an esteemed professeur, and applied my “knowledge”. You could imagine that as a foreigner I would be forgiven for this oversight. It’s a well-known fact that English speakers are often confused about which to use. The problem was that, having a passionate and inexplicable drive to speak perfect French, both my accent and grammar were pretty damn good by then. There was not much foreign about me.

The professeur did not correct me. He let me painfully discover my own mistake as I attended classes in groups, orchestra rehearsals and chamber music classes for example, and listened to how it actually worked there. Like in a lot of educational establishments, I noticed that the teachers were addressed with vous, and they answered the students with tu.*

Now, having an introverted tendency to make real life relationships more complicated than they need to be, I did not go back to my erudite professor and excuse myself for my rookie mistake, and move on. Nope. I just avoided using the pronoun for the rest of my time with him (a lot harder than it sounds) and asked to switch teachers at the end of the year. I am cringing as I write.

*Depending on the establishment and the age of the students, the teachers may also use vous to address the students. In an adult-learning context, everybody will be on equal terms, using either vous or tu both ways.

A weirdo making friends

I once dated a guy who had a rather pretentious tendency to pretend he was posher than he was, coupled with the lofty aspiration to form meaningful friendships with what he evidently considered to be common people. (My taste in men has since evolved).

The common person I’m going to tell you about was a chain-smoking, whisky-chugging mechanic with years of engine grime under his fingernails.

Now, the mechanic being slightly older than my ex, wannabe-posh guy decided he was going to address him with vous, as a mark of respect for the years of wisdom acquired under the bonnet. And this was something he resolved to maintain, even after the friendship had reached cosy-dinner-with-mechanic’s-family status. Now, if you are learning French, you should know that this is highly pretentious behaviour. A normal French person would have long since started using tu.

The mechanic was a little abashed by so much reverence and answered in kind, although it was evidently a little awkward for him. He kept it up through three cosy dinners, until one such social occasion involved a little too much whisky, and he - literally - brought a fist smashing to the table and demanded that the nonsense stop, and we call each other tu like normal people.

You may have been taught that vous is the rule for all strangers except children. This is not often true in informal, social settings, where using tu straight away with a stranger can mark the intention to make friends, signal the desire to be informal, or acknowledge that the person is part of your friendship group, even if they are still a stranger to you.

Parents-in-law

My experience as an au pair with the very traditional family had left me with the impression that parents-in-law were to be vouvoyés. And they often are, although this is mostly viewed as old-fashioned now. If you are on the verge of meeting future in-laws, my advice is just to ask your partner in advance of the meeting what would be most appropriate in their family.

I did not do this. I carried the conviction that parents-in-law were to be revered with vous into the first meeting with my fiancé’s family. There was no grand stairway in their house, and they hadn’t been to church since they were christened. Still, nobody bothered to correct me, it was very much a do-as-you-please type setting, and if I wanted to say vous then nobody was going to stop me.

I continued to see them after my divorce as they are my son’s grandparents. I’m on very friendly terms with my ex-husband’s new girlfriend. And it was weird, when I found myself having tea with my ex-mother-in-law and the new girlfriend. Not weird for the reasons you might expect, we all got along fine. No, it was weird because I had been saying vous to my ex-mother-in-law for twenty years (some habits are hard to change), and the new girl, uninfluenced by traditional Catholic grandparent dynamics, used an effortless tu.

Take-away:

I hope these stories made you smile. Remember to use vous when you’re ordering something in a shop or a restaurant, or talking to an old lady in the street. In a lot of other situations, you may need to use your learner’s antenna to ascertain what the particular dynamic of that situation is. Language learning is a lot about being sensitive to different contexts. And some embarrassment along the way is just a rite of passage.

Remember, if you’re not sure, no-one will be offended if you ask directly what would be appropriate. That’s often better than assuming you know, as I hope my stories have shown.