How to Hold a Conversation in French. An Easy Step by Step Guide 💬

Bonjour !

A great way to start conversing in French is to learn the basics of how the language works, then practice with someone (I promise it’s not as scary as it sounds).

I call this technique a “word map” and I love sharing it with my private French students.

It’s kind of a goofy name, but whenever I make one of these it’s usually pretty hard to get lost after. (You can watch a video where I explain it in much more detail in our FREE French e-Course)

This is the basic structure of most French sentences:

Subject + conjugated verb + infinitive

(Examples of infinitives: faire - to do, manger - to eat, etc)

Then after memorizing this table and maybe 10-20 infinitives, you can say a lot of stuff:

Except for je vais and tu vas / il elle on va, all of these verbs sound the same!

Je dois, tu dois, il/elle/on doit
 even though it’s spelled differently, dois is pronounced the same !

And for the moment we won’t worry about vous and ils, because you’ll probably use je, tu, and il/elle/on a lot more anyway

We just don’t want to worry about too much in the beginning, simplify everything for now and we can add more complex elements later.

Now you can add some infinitives, some of my favorites are:

Bosser - to work (slang)

Faire un tour - to go for a walk

Faire Ă  manger - to make something to eat

And now we put it all together:
Je dois boser - I have to work

And that’s it! That’s how you make a basic sentence in French without really knowing a whole lot.

You can add a ton of variations around it:

Demain, je dois bosser - tomorrow, I have to work

Je (ne) peux pas, je dois bosser - I can’t, I have to work 

Il (ne) veut pas bosser aujourd’hui - He doesn’t want to work today

Tu peux bosser ? - You can work ?

Then it’s just practice. I go way more in depth than I ever could in an email in our FREE French e-Course that I just updated.

I’ll give you more tools you can use:

  • To start having conversations naturally in French

  • I’ll explain why you have a hard time understanding French TV shows and movies (and what to do about it)

  • Where you can find friends to practice French with (which is absolutely necessary in order to be able to speak French well)

+ more !! All for FREE. Enjoy !!

If you have any questions, please send me a DM on Instagram ! I’d love to help you

À bientît !

-Charlie

Charles Whitesides