Building Structures in French - Structure 1

Bonjour et bienvenue 😊🇫🇷

What is Building Structures?

The whole of the French language can be broken down into several different structures. If you take any sentence from any French book or any utterance, you will see that it fits into one of these structures.

I remember one weekend, I was writing some lessons for the week ahead, when I suddenly realised this. I noticed that there are a certain number of structures in French, and that every sentence follows one of these structures. I spent the rest of the weekend working out all the structures, and I wrote every one of them down.

Every structure you learn gives you the ability to say a huge amount. Some structures are used more than others, but all the structures together make up the whole French language. Once you’ve learnt how a structure works, all you have to do is insert different words into the slots and you have a sentence.

This course introduces you to structure 1.

If you imagine each structure is like some sort of a really simple jigsaw puzzle. Structure 1 has three pieces, but you can choose which piece to put at the start, which piece to put in the middle and which piece to put at the end.

Just by rearranging the pieces in the picture above, you can say the following questions in French:

Que voulez-vous manger? - What do you want to eat?
Où voulez-vous manger? - Where do you want to eat?
Quand voulez-vous manger? - When do you want to eat?
Que devez-vous faire? - What do you have to do?
Quand allez-vous manger? - When are you going to eat?
Où allez-vous manger? - Where are you going to eat?
Que voulez-vous acheter? - What do you want to buy?
Que voulez-vous boire? - What do you want to drink?

In this course, you'll learn how to use this structure in full, and you'll be able to form thousands of different questions.

I’ve limited each course to one structure so as not to overburden you. By looking at just one structure at a time, you can really get to grips with it and understand its usage. It will help to clarify the French language and make it more like a reflex rather than something you have to think about as is it were a maths equation.

Each structure can also help to propel you to fluency; if you can manipulate the structures at high speed, you can start to say anything you want without having to think about how to say it.

This course contains plenty of practice opportunities for you to revise what you’ve learnt and it also contains some hints and tips on how best to learn and memorise the structures and the vocabulary that goes with them. You’ll learn how to make questions out of structure 1, how to make statements and how to turn positive statements negative.

The Building Structures in French series is set out using the same learning techniques as the 3 Minute French courses. You can work through the course in three-minute chunks, enabling anybody to learn French, no matter how little time you have.