Hobbies: Grammar and Phonics (AQA GCSE French): Revision Note

Many of the key verbs used to talk about hobbies are irregular. Let's look at some of them in more detail.

High-frequency irregular verbs

• Most French verbs are regular, which means they follow a pattern, e.g. jouer

• Irregular verbs don’t follow a pattern so they need to be learned separately

• Some key irregular verbs you need to talk about hobbies are:

  • aller (to go)

  • écrire (to write)

  • faire (to do / to make)

  • lire (to read)

  • prendre (to take)

  • sortir (to go out)

• Here are their present tense forms:

• Remember that you can add ne … pas around any verb to say that you don’t do something:

  • Je ne vais pas a la piscine.

    I don’t go to the swimming pool.

  • Nous ne lisons pas de journaux.

    We don’t read newspapers.

Hobbies: phonics

Phonics

• The French sound [-tion] is pronounced differently to English

• Most of the time, you will see it at the end of a word, where the [t] is an [s] sound, and the [ion] is a nasal sound

   je fais de la natation

  la participation est importante

• The [n] in [ion] is pronounced when it is followed by a vowel

  une équipe nationale