French mistakes English speakers make

The mistakes that cost you in French are rarely grammatical. Get a tense wrong and the person opposite understands you, repairs it silently and carries on. What lands badly is a sentence that is correct in every textbook sense while being aimed at the wrong person, said at the wrong hour, or translated so faithfully from English that it now means something else: an entrée that arrives as a starter, a glass of water that arrives on the bill, telling a room you are hot and announcing something quite different. Writing the French list for The Vocabcord 500, we kept a note column beside the phrases for exactly this, and 146 of the 500 rows ended up with one. Here are 47 of them, sorted by the kind of trap instead of by the situation.

The mistake happens before your sentence starts

France runs on a word most courses file under greetings and treat as optional. Bonjour. is the entry fee for an exchange, and our note beside it says what the translation will not: walking up to a counter without it reads as rude. It usually goes like this. A learner rehearses a polite request down the street, opens with une baguette s'il vous plaît, and reads the flat reply as a verdict on their accent. The sentence was fine. The greeting in front of it was missing, and in France that greeting carries the politeness.

Its neighbours run on a clock and a register. Bonsoir takes over from late afternoon and becomes Bonne soirée on the way out. Salut ! belongs to friends and peers, which rules it out with a landlord or anyone behind a counter. Bonjour, ça va ? is for people you already know; with a stranger the bonjour does the whole job by itself. Allô ? lives entirely inside the telephone.

The vous call, and the sentence that ends it

English speakers imagine formality as a dial that drifts down over months. French treats it as a switch, and somebody has to throw it out loud. The sentence for that is On peut se tutoyer ?, can we use tu, and our note puts a clock on it: ask in the first hour, because most offices are on tu by lunchtime. Guessing costs you both ways. Stay on vous after the room has switched and you are holding everyone at arm's length; use tu with someone who is serving you and it reads as talking down.

Small words follow the switch. S'il vous plaît becomes s'il te plaît. Enchanté, moi c'est Anna. is the introduction for a tu office, while je m'appelle stays for forms and strangers. Chat is its own country: Tu as vu mon message ? is tu on purpose, because almost nobody types vous to a colleague. There is one line you can aim at a stranger without weighing any of this. À vos souhaits ! follows a sneeze from anyone to anyone, and à tes souhaits is the version for people you already tutoie.

The words that look like English and have other jobs

The false friends that hurt in French are the ones you meet while ordering, because the punishment arrives on a plate. Comme entrée, la soupe. orders the soup to start with. Entrée is the starter in France and the main course only on an American menu; the French word never moved. La carte is the menu you read; le menu is the fixed-price set meal, so asking for the wrong one gets you the other. Un café, s'il vous plaît. brings a small espresso, and Un demi, s'il vous plaît. brings 25 cl rather than the half litre the word promises.

Two carry a real cost. Noix is strictly walnuts, so an allergy announced with noix leaves peanuts and other tree nuts outside the sentence; fruits à coque and arachides cover them. The English word receipt splits three ways in French, and the choice decides whether work reimburses you. Un plan is the city or metro map while une carte is the road map, which makes Vous pouvez me montrer sur le plan ? the sentence for a station. A ticket covers bus, metro and tram, the train wants a billet, and Un ticket, s'il vous plaît. is the wrong request at a mainline counter.

Nothing arrives at a French table unless you ask

An English speaker in a French restaurant waits for three things that only ever come on request. Water is the first and the one that costs money. Ask for de l'eau and a bottle can arrive and go on the bill; the free version is tap water in a jug and it has its own name, so Une carafe d'eau, s'il vous plaît. is the sentence, said while you order rather than after the bottle is open.

The bill is the second. Nobody brings it unprompted and nobody is moving you along, so the meal ends when you say L'addition, s'il vous plaît. across the room, or catch an eye and scribble in the air. Leftovers are the third, and there the mistake is silence: Vous pouvez emballer le reste ? is legal and ordinary in France now, whatever an old guidebook said about it. None of the three is a hard sentence. What makes them traps is that waiting feels like the polite move, and waiting is the one thing that does not work.

Correct French that arrives as rudeness

Some sentences are grammatical, idiomatic and still land wrong, because English carries its politeness in the tune while French carries it in a word you can delete by accident. Attendez, s'il vous plaît. means hold on, please, and it is friendly. Strip the s'il vous plaît, as a learner economising on syllables will, and Attendez alone is an order. The same economy ruins a refusal: Je n'aime pas trop. is the softened I'm not keen; a flat je n'aime pas is harsher in French than its English translation looks.

Register decides the rest. C'est nul. is fine about a film and risky about the thing a colleague spent a week on. Vous faites quoi dans la vie ? is the polite way to ask what someone does, and asked early it reads as nosy to plenty of French people, so let them ask first. Going the other way, Pas de souci., no problem, works with tu or vous; purists sniff and everyone says it anyway.

Two kinds of feminine ending, one of them silent

French agreement bites in writing far more often than in speech, and half of it never bites at all. Je suis désolé. and désolée are one sound, so a woman apologising out loud is safe and the same woman apologising by email is one letter from looking careless. Perdue when you are lost, débordée when you are swamped, sûre when you are not certain, remboursée when you want your money back: the ending is written and never heard. That is why the habit survives for years inside otherwise good French. Nothing in the room flags it.

The other half is heard on the spot, and a learner who files all of this under the silent e will get caught by it. Je suis irlandais. and irlandaise are not homophones: the written s wakes up as a z. Nouveau turns into nouvelle, étudiant into étudiante, végétarien into végétarienne, and a woman introducing herself with Bonjour, je suis nouveau. is wrong out loud as well as on paper. So the rule worth carrying is about the ending you are holding: é and u are the quiet ones, and an ending in a consonant arrives with the consonant. Our note column keeps the feminine beside every adjective a person uses about themselves, because those are the ones that end up in a message, and French leaves the small letter that English capitalises.

Where word-for-word quietly breaks

A few everyday lines invert when you translate them one word at a time, and the worst offender is a compliment you did not mean to pay. English is hot; French has heat. J'ai chaud. is the sentence. Je suis chaud says you are up for it and je suis chaude goes further still, which is a lot of consequence for one verb. Seats invert too: Cette place est libre ? asks whether the seat is free, so oui means sit down, and the learner who translated is this seat taken hears yes and walks away from an empty chair.

Two more are worth rehearsing. In a packed metro the person behind you asks Vous descendez ?, are you getting off, which is a request to be let past. Liking runs through different verbs depending on the object: Ça me plaît. and j'aime bien both cover a place or a dish, while j'aime on its own, said about a person, means love. Toilets stay plural, always.

The regional split, and the pastry people argue about

We wrote the French list in the French of France and noted Quebec only where the everyday word differs, which is worth stating because it decides what counts as a mistake here. Inside France the splits are sharper than learners expect. Un pain au chocolat. is a chocolatine across the south-west, and the note beside it says the only safe thing about that argument: both sides are certain they are right.

Geography moves vocabulary in duller places too. The police station is the commissariat in a town and the gendarmerie in the countryside, same job under a different sign, so Où est le commissariat ? can draw a correction instead of directions in a village. Bin colours are municipal, with yellow for recycling across most of France and the details set by the town, which makes La poubelle jaune, c'est pour quoi ? safer than a rule carried from your last address. Email splits widest: un mail is what France says aloud, while courriel is the official word and the ordinary one in Quebec.

The right sentence at the wrong hour

The last family has nothing wrong with the words. Vous servez encore ? asks whether a kitchen is still serving, and at half past three it can only get you non, because kitchens close around 2 pm and come back at 7. That non is about the hour. It still gets heard as unfriendliness. Send-offs run on a clock too: Bonne journée. in the daytime, bonne soirée in the evening, À tout à l'heure. only when you will see the person again before the day ends.

Work keeps two clocks. Meetings run on the 24-hour one, so On a une réunion à 14 heures. is how you say two o'clock, while deux heures points at 2 am or a vague afternoon. Encouragement splits by occasion: Bon courage ! is what a colleague says as you head into a shift, and bonne chance is for exams and lottery tickets, so offering it for an ordinary Tuesday sounds like a verdict on the odds. Platforms go up about 20 minutes before departure and the ticket rarely names one, so Il part de quel quai ? is a question for the board rather than for the ticket.

What a note column cannot fix

Three things on this page are beyond what any list does. Your mouth is the first: the u in tu and the ou in tout are a genuine minimal pair, and a reader who gets every trap here right can still spend a week ordering things nobody recognises. Second is the room, where tone decides whether Pas de souci sounds warm or dismissive, and no column records the shrug that carries it. Coverage is the third. Our notes came out of the situations we wrote for, so the traps waiting in a hospital corridor or a parents' evening are simply absent from the file.

Worth saying plainly: the notes are the work of the person who built the list, and no independent native-speaker sign-off is documented for this batch. Editorial passes are what we have. If we rewrote the column we would add a recovery line beside each trap, because knowing that Attendez lands as an order helps far less than knowing what to say in the two seconds after you have said it.

How a trap stops being a trap

Reading a warning and surviving the moment it describes are different skills, and the gap between them closes with repetition you did not schedule. That is the idea behind the app: a phrase plays when the phone goes on charge, once the automation is set up, and the loop is described in One word per charge. What you hear is the French, a pause, the English, a pause, the French again. Which phrase arrives is picked by weight, favouring entries you have not heard recently, so the ones you keep missing keep coming back. The audio is text-to-speech.

These 500 phrases are published as pages first and become app packs with audio later. The full French list, note column intact on every row that has one, is The 500 French phrases you actually need, and the six lists sit together on The Vocabcord 500. Start with the greeting. It is one word, it goes in front of everything else, and it repairs more than any other correction here.

Common questions

What is the most common mistake English speakers make in French?

Skipping bonjour. Bonjour. opens the exchange in France, and a request that starts without it reads as rude even when the request itself is polite and correct. Say it walking up to the counter, before the question. It is the cheapest fix on this page.

When do you use tu instead of vous in French?

Vous is the default with strangers, officials and anyone serving you. At work the switch gets made out loud with On peut se tutoyer ?, usually in the first hour, and most offices are on tu by lunchtime. Chat and messaging are tu with almost every colleague. Let the French speaker offer it if you are unsure.

Does entrée mean starter or main course in French?

Starter. Comme entrée, la soupe. orders the soup to begin with, and the main course is the plat. The word means the main course only on American menus, which is why a French menu read with English instincts can produce two starters and no dinner.

Is tap water free in French restaurants?

Yes, and it has a name. Une carafe d'eau, s'il vous plaît. gets you a jug of tap water at no charge, which restaurants are required to serve. Ask for de l'eau instead and a bottle of mineral water can arrive and go on the bill, so say the word carafe while you are still ordering.

Is it pain au chocolat or chocolatine?

Both, depending on where you are standing. Un pain au chocolat. works in most of France and chocolatine is the word across the south-west, where people feel strongly about it. Our French list is written in the French of France, with regional and Quebec variants noted where the everyday word differs.