3 Minute French - Course 5 | Language lessons for beginners

Welcome to course 5 :-)

Voici le cinquième cours - here is the fifth course of the 3 Minute French series. This course leads on perfectly from course 4 and builds on the knowledge of talking about the past that we touched on previously.

Remember, in order to get the most out of the 3 Minute French series, keep your study sessions short enough that you don't feel like French is becoming a chore. It might be tempting to set aside a couple of hours to learn, but the best way to really acquire all the new knowledge is to give your brain time to process it - and that takes place in between lessons.

In each lesson, you'll be learning lots of new vocabulary, linguistic structures and useful information for speaking French fluently. However, in order for all of this to find a home safely in your brain, you have to go away and think about it. It's much better to have a three-minute lesson, and then go away and process what you've learnt for the rest of the day, than to sit watching videos for an hour and then to feel so drained you want to think about anything but French for the rest of the evening!

A new idea needs time to embed itself in your mind. When you learn something, the time afterwards when you play around with the idea and try building your own sentences in French is when deep learning takes place.

In this lesson, we are really expanding our vocabulary and opening up huge new areas of the French language. We'll be looking at new ways to use adjectives with the little phrase quelque chose de, we'll be looking at the useful phrase il y a, and it's question equivalent, y a-t-il?, and we'll also get introduced to possibly the most useful phrase in the French language est-ce que.

We'll also be looking at lots of very useful adverbs that will add variety and depth to our language. Phrases like trop de, beaucoup de and choses à are great for opening up new areas of conversation.

We'll also start to look at ways that French and English differ. You can't always translate things word-for-word, and the past tense is a great example of this. We'll be looking at how English often has more than one way to say the same thing, which can sometimes cause problems when we're trying to work out how to say something in French.

The past tense, or more specifically, the present perfect tense, is the tense we're going to be looking at in depth in this course. We'll look at how to form it with regular verbs, we'll look at some common irregular verbs, and also look at the different things it can mean in English in the positive and negative.

That's just a brief look at a few of things we'll be learning in this course, but there will be much more.