Learning French – The 100 Most Common French Words and Why You Don’t Need to Learn Them




According to various sources, the one hundred most common French words make up as much as fifty percent of all communication. So if you are learning French, it would be logical then, to start learning these words first – you would then already be able to say half of what a native French speaker can say, right?

Wrong. Just take a look at any website teaching kids to read and you’ll see that the most common words in English start with the, it, of, a, to, etc. In fact, there are only a handful of nouns like man, or girl with which you could actually say something useful.

In grammatical terms, the vast majority of these common words are prepositions, articles, determiners and conjunctions. These words don’t have any real meaning in themselves, they just help us to make nice, “correct” sentences. Try to say something meaningful using only the following words, I bet you can’t:

on, at, by, with, an, but, big, and

So these words do make up fifty percent of language, but you can’t say anything with them. Now let’s go back to learning French. There’s another complication – if I start translating my list of the one hundred most common English words into French, I now find that there are several different ways of rendering them in French. Not only that, but if I learn how to say “to” in French (à, au, aux, en) and I want to say “I’m married to a beautiful woman”, I then find that a French person actually says “I’m married with a beautiful woman” (je suis marié avec une belle femme).

A better way.

Imagine that instead of wasting your time learning individual common French words, a much more efficient way is would be to start with a piece of language – a phrase, a sentence, a compound word, learn it and only after committing it memory and practicing using it you’ll try to understand how it all works from a grammatical point of view. Let’s take for an example the French preposition de.

* Un verre de vin – a bottle of wine
* Je n’ai pas de monnaie – I don’t have any money
* Je viens de Paris – I’m from Paris
Instead of learning common French words out of context, you are actually making use of them in phrases that might actually turn out to be useful!

Learn French Now. There are French courses today that are not only effective, but fun too.

Jonathan Lewis has helped thousands of French speakers learn English, and wants you to learn French. Since moving to France in 2001, he has worked on language projects for the French Ministry of Education and published a book on learning French with HarperCollins. Visit his Learn French website.






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