Adjectives In French For Beginners

Being able to use an adjective is going to help your language skills massively. An adjective is a descriptive word, so you can very quickly start to add details and express yourself better by adding them in to your sentences.

Adjectives In English

In English sentences adjectives are linked to the noun. They modify a noun by giving us more information about it or help us describe it.

If I say “I have a dog” you get the concept, but if I start adding adjectives, you can really start to build a picture of what I have… “I have a small brown fluffy dog” is very different to “I have a big nasty white dog”.

The adjectives help modify and describe what type of dog I have. They can describe size, colour, quantity or shape. Basically they can describe any physical or emotional characteristic of something. 

You will also see that we put our adjectives before the noun “The green car” or “The big cake”.

Just as a reminder. These are not the same as Adverbs which do a similar job, but they describe verbs.    

Adjectives In French

Adjectives in French work the same way as in English. They are used to give more information about a noun.

However, where they are placed in a sentence and how they are pronounced or spelt can depend on a few things.

Where In The Sentence Do Adjectives Go In French ?

Most adjectives in French come after the noun, but not all of them.

If we look at the two examples from above we can see both in action

“The green car – la voiture verte”

“The big cake – le gros gâteau”

The words that come before the noun are from the following groups:

• Beauty – beautify/handsome/nice
• Age – old/you new/old
• Good/Bad  
• Size – big/small

Every other type of adjective that does not fall into the above groups will be placed after the noun.

Gender And Adjectives In French

As you have hopefully seen already, words in French sentences must all agree with each other and adjectives also follow this rule.

The gender of the adjective must match the noun it is describing. This means every adjective has a masculine and feminine version.

If we look at the Car and Cake example from above we can see how this works.

If we want to say that both of these items are green, we would use the adjective “vert – green”

The word “cake” is a masculine word and we use “vert” which is the masculine spelling

so “the green cake – Le gateau vert”

The word “car” is a feminine word, so we need to make the adjective “vert” feminine too. We do this by adding an –E to the end of the word so it becomes “verte” and now every part of the sentence is in agreement.

“The green car – la voiture verte”

Most adjectives can be made feminine by adding an –E, but of course there are some irregulars

Irregular Gender Endings And Adjectives In French

• If a masculine adjective already ends with an –E, then you do not need to add another. The words just stay the same for both the masculine and feminine version.

For example – drôle – funny, ends with an –E so it the same in the masculine and feminine form. 

• If a masculine word ends in –eux, then this is removed and replaced with –euse to make it feminine.

For example. Happy is heureux when masculine and heureuse when feminine

• If a masculine word ends in –f, then this is removed and replaced with -ive to make it feminine.

For example athletic is Actif when masculine and Active when feminine.

• If a  masculine words ends in -on, -en or -el, then the final constant is doubled and then an –E is added to make it feminine.

Cute – Mignon  – Mignonne

Canadian – canadien – canadienne

Professional – professionnel -professionnelle

• If a masculine words ends in – in, -il, or -ul you add an extra l and then add an –E to make it feminine

inne, ille, ulle

• If a masculine words ends in -ot or –et you add an extra t and then add an –E to make it feminine

otte, ette

• If a masculine words ends in -s you add an extra s and then add an –E to make it feminine

-sse

There are then some words where the masculine and feminine versions do not follow any of rules and are completely different. These very irregular words you will just have to learn as you come across them.                                         

Plurals And Adjectives In French

Making an adjective a plural is very easy.

The word needs to agree with the gender of the noun, so you will need to make sure the words is masculine or feminine.

This means you need to follow the above rules to make sure you have the word correctly spelt for the correct gender.

You then just need to add an –S to the end of the word to make it plural.

Using More Than One Adjective In A Sentence In French

Sometimes you need to use more than one adjective to describe something.

If one of the adjectives you are using would usually come before the noun (if it was being used alone), and the other would normally come after it (if it was being used alone)

Then you just do this and put them on whatever side of the noun they would normally be.

However, if both words would normally come after the nouns, then you need to place them one after another, with the word “et” in the middle, which means “and”.

Conclusion

Adjectives can be really hard to get right as there are so many little rules with them. They are worth trying to master as they can really take you from a beginner and saying basic things, to being able to form really detailed and descriptive sentences.

At the start try not to worry about them too much when speaking, however, you should be reading a lot in French and you should try and notice how they are used and how they are spelt to get your understanding of adjectives stronger over time.

(Read the next lesson – French Possessive Adjectives)