Festivals and Traditions: Grammar and Phonics (AQA GCSE French): Revision Note

When talking about festivals and traditions, it is useful to say how much of something there is, e.g. 'lots of fireworks', 'too many people'. Use adverbs of quantity for this. The adverbial pronouns y and en are useful in this topic to refer back to 'it' or 'them'. Let's look at these grammar points in more detail.

Adverbs of quantity

• Adverbs of quantity tell us how much there is of something

• Use them with a noun + de

• De becomes d' before nouns starting with a vowel or silent 'h'

• It never changes to de la, du, etc., and no definite article (le, la …) is used - the number and gender of the noun doesn’t matter

  • beaucoup de gens

    lots of people

  • tellement de traditions

    so many traditions

  • trop de bruit

    too much noise

  • trop de touristes

    too many tourists

  • (un) peu de musique

    a bit of music

Adverbial pronouns

Higher tier only

This grammar is only required for Higher tier.

• Use prepositions y and en to avoid repetition or add variety to your language

• They can replace nouns in certain structures

• Place y or en between the subject and the verb

• When translating y and en, the English meaning may vary

• Some useful phrases with en + adverbs of quantity are:

  • il y en a (trop)

    there are (too many) of them

  • il y en avait (peu)

    there were (not many) of them

  • il y en aura (beaucoup)

    there will be (lots of) them

• In the phrases above, you can replace the words in brackets with any adverb of quantity

Festivals and traditions: phonics

• The French sounds [ill] and [ille] sound the same in words like famille and billet

• They are usually pronounced like 'ee' in English

  ma famille a un billet pour le festival

• In certain words, the letter [l] is pronounced softly after the 'ee' sound

  il y a mille personnes en ville