English / Français
Sentence diagrams, side by side
Pick a pattern. The top figure shows where each word sits in the spoken sentence. The diagrams below show what each word is doing. Often the diagrams match and only the word order changes. Sometimes French builds the sentence differently.
Same diagram. Only the word order changes.
- Descriptive adjectives such as colours usually come after the noun: maison rouge, literally “house red”.
- Some short, common adjectives come before the noun: petit, grand, beau, bon, joli, jeune, vieux. Examples: une grande maison, un beau jardin. The position can change the meaning: un grand homme is a great man, un homme grand is a tall one.
- After être (to be) the adjective always comes after the verb: La maison est grande.
- The adjective agrees with its noun. Grande ends in -e because maison is feminine. The masculine is grand: Le jardin est grand. Rouge already ends in -e, so it does not change in the feminine.
- Both adjectives are in the same places in the two diagrams, so the structure is the same.
The object pronoun comes before the verb.
- The unstressed object pronouns me, te, le, la, nous, vous, les go directly before the conjugated verb. Positive commands are the exception.
- Le stands for a masculine noun or for “him”, and la for a feminine noun or “her”. Before a vowel both become l’: Je l’aime.
- A full noun stays after the verb: Je vois le chat, Je vois Luc.
- Le is still the direct object, so it sits in the object slot of the diagram.
- More on where pronouns go: Pronouns.
English adds a helper verb. French puts ne before the pronoun and verb, and pas after the verb.
- Ne goes before the pronoun and the verb, and pas goes right after the verb: Je ne le vois pas.
- There is no equivalent of “do”.
- Both negative words are adverbs hanging under the verb in the French diagram.
- Ne becomes n’ before a vowel: Je ne l’aime pas.
- More negative words, and what happens to du and des: Negation.
The person who is missed is the subject. The person who misses is the indirect object.
- Read Tu me manques as “you are missing to me” to see how it is built. That is not an English sentence, but it shows who the subject is: tu.
- The verb agrees with the person who is missed: Tu me manques, Elle me manque, Ils me manquent.
- The same pattern works with any noun: Luc me manque means I miss Luc. With a name or a noun after the verb, the person who misses takes à: Je manque à Camille means Camille misses me.
- Me goes before the verb, like the object pronouns in the first patterns.
French needs an article before the noun. English uses none.
- The partitive article means “some” or “an amount of”. It has four forms: du pain, de la soupe, de l’eau, des légumes.
- Du is de and le combined. It goes with a masculine noun. A feminine noun takes de la, a noun starting with a vowel takes de l’, and a plural takes des.
- French does not drop this article: Je mange pain is not French.
- For a general statement, French uses le, la or les: J’aime le pain means I like bread.
- After a negative, du, de la and des become de: Je ne mange pas de pain. See Negation.
Both sentences start with a word that means nothing on its own. In French that word, il, is the grammatical subject, so the verb never agrees with the noun.
- Il y a means both “there is” and “there are”. The verb does not change: Il y a un chat, Il y a deux chats.
- English “there” is a placeholder: it fills the subject position, but the verb agrees with the noun after it (“There is a cat”, “There are two cats”). The English diagram puts “there” on a line of its own and the noun in the subject slot.
- Il is also a placeholder. It does not stand for the cat, but it is the grammatical subject of a, so the verb stays singular. The noun after the verb completes the expression. The French diagram draws it in the object position.
- Y is the word that means “there” elsewhere. In il y a it is part of the fixed expression, and in the diagram it hangs under the verb.
- In the negative, un, une and des become de, as after other negative verbs: Il n’y a pas de chat.
French uses avoir (to have) plus a noun where English uses “be” plus an adjective.
- In the word-order figure J’ and ai are two separate words. Je loses its vowel before a vowel sound, and the apostrophe marks the missing letter. This is called elision. It also happens with le, la, ne, que, me, te and de: l’ami, n’est, qu’il.
- Several states are said with avoir and a noun: avoir soif (thirsty), avoir peur (afraid), avoir chaud (hot), avoir froid (cold), avoir raison (right). So is age: J’ai trente ans means I am thirty.
- Je suis faim does not mean “I am hungry”. To say “very hungry”, use très before the noun: J’ai très faim.
- The line before faim stops at the baseline, because it is an object. The line before hungry leans back toward the subject, because it describes the subject.
English moves the verb before the subject. French keeps the order and can add est-ce que at the start.
- Est-ce que goes in front of a statement and turns it into a question: Tu viens. becomes Est-ce que tu viens ?.
- Before a vowel it becomes est-ce qu’: Est-ce qu’il vient ?.
- A shortcut in speech: raise your voice and keep the statement order, Tu viens ? It is common in everyday conversation.
- A more formal way is to put the verb before the subject and join them with a hyphen: Viens-tu ?.
- French has no “-ing” form here. The present tense, tu viens, covers both “you come” and “you are coming”.
- French writes a space before ?, !, : and ;. The space is non-breaking, so the mark never starts a new line.
How to read a diagram
- The baseline holds the core of the sentence. The line that crosses it splits subject from verb.
- A line that stops at the baseline comes before a direct object.
- A line leaning back toward the subject comes before a word that describes the subject.
- Articles, adjectives and adverbs hang on slanted lines under the word they modify.
- A preposition goes on a slanted line, and its object sits on the line below it.