How to Use Negation In French For Beginners

Negation is the act of making a statement negative.

Negation in French can seem confusing as its slightly different to English, bit its actually quite simple when you get the hang of it.

Negation In English

In English we mostly make a statement negative by using “Not”.

However, we also usually need to add another verb to help make “not” work a little better.

If we try to turn “I sing” into a negative, you will see that only adding “not” on its own is all wrong.

It becomes “I not sing” which sound awful. We need that extra verb to help make this smoother. A lot of the time we will use the verb “do” to make this work    

“I sing”, now becomes “I do not sing”.

This is negation, there are of course many other ways to make a statement negative, but this is one of the most common and simplest.

Negation In French

In French it is not the same as English, it’s actually quite simple. If you want to make something negative, you add two special words either side of the verb, which will make it negative.  

Ne… Pas

This is the simplest form of negation and is probably the most common.  This is the equivalent to “Not”

You simply have to put ‘ne’ and ‘pas’ either side of the verb you want to make negative.

For example:

Je mange – I eat

Becomes

Je ne mange pas – I do not eat

Sometimes, there may be two verbs in a sentence; this may be to denote a certain tense or just to give more emphasis to the second verb.

Such as “I am going to dance” or “I want to dance”

In sentences like this, we treat them like we would in English. We add the negation to the first verb.

You want to say “I am not going to dance” so you say “je ne vais pas danser”.

Just take a second to think about it. You would not say “I am going not to dance” or “I am going to dance not”

You need the negation to be around the ‘going to’ verb, this is the thing that is changing. The dancing part is irrelevant. In English, depending on the conversation, you could potentially just say “I am not going to” and then the ‘dancing’ is implied.

If you stop and study a French sentence, you will find it works the same way. It is the “je ne vais pas…” section of the sentence that is the negative part. The verb that follows can be changed to anything or even dropped like in English if you believe it can be implied without saying it.  

Other Forms Of Negation In French

Using Ne… Pas will be the most common technique you see but I will go through the other variations as they are always good to know.

They all work in the same way; they sit either side of the verb to make it negative.

Ne… Rien

This is used when you want to say ‘anything’

Such as

Je mange – I eat

Becomes

“Je ne mange rien…”  “I do not eat anything…”

Or more famously you may already know this negation from the Edith Piaf song – Non, je ne regrette rien

Which of course means, “No, I do not regret anything”.

Ne… Jamais

This is used to say “never”

Je mange – I eat

Becomes

Je ne manger jamais –  I never eat

Ne… Personne

This is used to when you want to say anyone/no one

 Je mange – I eat

Becomes

“Je ne mange personne” –“I do not eat anyone” (okay, weird example, but you get the idea)

Ne… Guère

This is used when you want to say “hardly”

Je mange – I eat

Becomes

 “Je ne mange guère” – “I hardly eat”

Ne… Aucun(e)

This can mean both “any” or “no” depending on how it is used.

Je mange – I eat

Becomes

Je ne mange aucun…    I do not eat any…

or

“Je n’ai accune respose” – “I have no answer”

Where here you can see it is wrapped around the verb “have”.

If you wrongly translated this to “I do not have any answer” I think you will still understand what is trying to be said, so do not worry too much about if it means “any” or “no” it should make sense when you see a sentence and are translating it.

Negation In Spoken French

In spoken French you will often here the ‘Ne’ is dropped and the speaker only says the ‘pas’ section. I would still recommend you say both parts until you are very confident in the language. It is just good information to know, as you may notice its missing, or you might not even notice a sentence has been turned negative as you did not hear the ‘Ne’.

In written French, you should always put both parts, although I am sure if you are speaking with a native who is being very informal, they may drop this from their texts.

Conclusion

Like English, you can see there are a lot of ways to make a sentence negative in French and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

The examples here should cover most of what you will ever need, but as you progress you will come across the other ways and can add them to your tool box of negations.

Learn these variations and be able to use them well and you will find this very helpful in everyday conversations.  

(read the next lesson – Adjectives In French)