3 Minute French - Course 6 | Language lessons for beginners

Welcome to course 6 :-)

Bienvenue au sixième cours de "3 Minute French" - Welcome to the sixth course of "3 Minute French". This course contains lessons 45 to 53 of the series, as well as a couple of bonus "half lessons" I had to add in because nine lessons just wasn't enough.

This course leads directly on from course 5 and we start immediately by recapping the "present perfect tense", which we learnt at the end of the last course. We'll be looking at how to form questions in the past and what different things these questions could mean in English.

Learning a new tense is something teachers sometimes glaze over, but verbs are the backbone of any language, so good proficiency in grammar is something that will take you far in language learning. We'll be making sure we know the present perfect tense inside out and back to front at the start of this course. There's nothing worse than being introduced to a tense, but then being too scared to use it because you don't quite feel confident enough to manipulate it at conversation speed. Well, in this course, we'll have plenty of opportunity to practise forming the past tense in French, so that when we come to use it in "real life", we can do so confidently.

We'll build on the knowledge we learnt in course 4 around using the word "le" to mean "it" (aka an object pronoun). We'll be learning lots more of these so-called object pronouns and how to use them with some new verbs we'll be learning, too. We'll look at how the little words "de" and "à" can be used in our sentences in ways you might not have thought of, and we'll look at the different meanings of them, too.

We'll start to explore a second way to talk about the past with phrases like "je voulais", "j'étais" and "j'avais". These aren't in the present perfect tense, but they're part of a different past tense in French.

We'll also be looking at negative sentences in French and how sometimes the word "des" shortens to "de" in front of plural nouns.

Again, this is just a brief glimpse at some of the things we'll be learning in this course, but as always, there's too much to mention it all here.

Alors, commençons - So, let's begin!