Monthly Archives: April 2025

Common One-Word Sentences in the French Classics

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While exploring French readability and the fact that sentence length is a key factor for English speakers learning French, I thought I’d take it to the extreme and see what are the most common one-word sentences in French literature. Here is the top 20. Note that it is highly influenced by Les Trois Mousquetaires, which is a sizeable portion of the corpus and responsible for about half the occurrences of “diable”.

  1. Ah
  2. Oh
  3. Non
  4. Hélas
  5. Oui
  6. Quoi
  7. Eh
  8. Comment
  9. Pourquoi
  10. Diable
  11. Bah
  12. Tiens
  13. Amen
  14. Moi
  15. Bon
  16. Vraiment
  17. Monsieur
  18. Jamais
  19. Pardieu
  20. Hé

In a different corpus less dominated by Les Trois Mousquetaires, the following were also found in the top 20:

  • Allons
  • Bien
  • Adieu
  • Rien
  • Jamais

In a modern corpus I think we would find different expletive-like exclamations than “Diable”, “Parbleu”, and “Pardieu”. A common one these days seems to be “Putain!”, or somewhat less extreme “Punaise!”. Maybe I’ll try to process the French movie subtitle corpus at some point to get a more up to date glimpse at one-word sentences in French.

A tale of three French picture books: passé simple is not that hard!

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One of the weird things about studying French is that we seem to have three levels:

  • Beginners use present tense, imperatives, infinitives, and future proche;
  • Intermediate learners use passé composé, imparfait, future and conditional tenses
  • Advanced learners use passé simple and subjonctif

Yet, if we look at picture books written for French children, many use passé simple straight off.

I remember when I started reading (in English) in Grade 1 of primary school, one thing I had to get used to was constructs like “said Dora”. It doesn’t happen in spoken English, so felt a little weird. But it wasn’t overly difficult. Perhaps people from English-speaking backgrounds who had stories read to them would have been familiar with that already before reading it. The same thing must be true for French children reading or hearing passé simple. It’s a little different but not hard.

I recently read three French picture books. The first (Le Grand Antonio by Élise Gravel) was a fairly easy one with few words, written in present tense. The second (Quel est mon superpouvoir? by Aviaq Johnston) was a translation from English, written in passé simple (and imparfait). It was a comfortable read for me. The third (Dounia by Marya Zarif) was (mostly) written in present tense but was more difficult due to its vocabulary and more descriptive text. It is obvious to me that it is possible for texts in passé simple to be easier than those in the easiest tenses.

The thing is, you don’t need to know how to conjugate passé simple to read it. You just need to recognise the endings of third person singular (3ps) and plural (3pp) for regular verbs plus know a few of the irregular verbs. Here they are.

For -er verbs, 3ps ends in -a and 3pp ends in -èrent.
For -ir and -re verbs, 3ps ends in -it and 3pp in -irent.
You may come across a few -oir verbs, which have -ut and -urent.

The main irregular verbs to watch out for are:

être: fut, furent
faire: fit, firent
avoir: eut, eurent

The regular ones should not pose any problems. The avoir ones are recognisable thanks to already knowing the past participle of avoir (eu). The main difficulty is not mixing up the être and faire words. A simple rule is that faire has an ‘i’ in it, and so does its passé simple conjugation.

I hope that helps. It helps me.