Healthy Lifestyles: Grammar and Phonics (AQA GCSE French): Revision Note

To talk about healthy lifestyles, you need to know some important grammar – reflexive pronouns and verbs and the impersonal verb il faut. Let’s look at these grammar points in more detail.

Reflexive pronouns and verbs

Je me couche à dix heures le soir et je me lève à sept heures du matin.

• Use reflexive verbs to talk about your daily routine, e.g. like in the sentence above to say when you go to sleep and wake up

• If an infinitive starts with se it is a reflexive verb

• Se is a reflexive pronoun, and we need to change both the verb and the reflexive pronoun to match the subject

• The reflexive pronoun is placed before the verb

• We often don’t use a reflexive pronoun in the English translation

Impersonal verbs - il faut

• The phrase il faut is an impersonal verb meaning ‘you must’ or ‘it is necessary to’

• It is called an impersonal verb as it is only used with the pronoun ‘it’ in French, never ‘I’, ‘you’ etc.

• It can be used to give advice or instructions, e.g. saying how you can lead a healthy lifestyle

• We use an infinitive after il faut:

  • il faut manger du fruit - you must eat fruit

  • il faut boire de l’eau - you must drink water

Healthy lifestyles: phonics

• Most French consonants are silent at the end of a word and are called silent final consonants

• However, if the following word starts with a vowel or silent 'h', we pronounce the consonant to link the two words

• This is called liaison and is most often heard with the silent final consonants s, t, n and x 

  les oreilles
  il faut éviter
  un effort
  deux heures