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Tu or Vous? 10 Situations to Practise On
Ten situations where the tu and vous rule does not settle it on its own, playable right here. You pick a pronoun, the reason appears straight away, and anything you get wrong comes back before the round ends. Five answers are tu and five are vous, so answering the same thing every time gets you half marks.
Which one would you use
1 / 10
A child of about eight stops you in the street to ask for directions.
The reason shows whether you were right or wrong, because on these cases you land on the right pronoun by chance about as often as by reasoning, and it is the reason that is worth keeping.
Why these ten and not the easy ones
The rule itself is three lines long. Tu for one person you are close to, vous for one person you do not know or who outranks you, and vous for any group at all. You can learn that in half a minute, and drilling it would teach you nothing you did not already have.
What costs you is the situation where two signals disagree. The waiter is your age, which says tu, but he is serving you, which says vous. The colleague is thirty years older, which says vous, but the company says tu to everyone. Those are the ones in this round, and the explanation after each tells you which signal wins and why.
One pattern is worth naming before you start, because it decides three of the ten. In English, seeing someone often and liking them slowly dissolves the formality. In French it does not. Familiarity and intimacy are separate things, and vous is not the cold setting, it is the ordinary one.
The reasoning behind all ten
The article next door takes the same situations slowly, and adds the half of the job the round does not test: the four things that have to move when the pronoun does. The verb ending is the one everybody remembers. The possessive is the one that gives you away, as in Vous avez ton billet ?
Read the full guideQuestions
- Is this tu vs vous practice free?
- Yes. Ten situations, playable in the page, with no account and nothing to install. Whatever you get wrong is handed back at the end of the round.
- Why are some of these situations so hard to call?
- Because the basic rule only settles the easy half. Tu for people you are close to, vous for strangers and for groups, covers most of a day. The situations in this round are the ones where two signals point in opposite directions, such as a waiter who is exactly your age, or a colleague thirty years older at a company where everybody says tu.
- If I get one wrong in real life, how bad is it?
- Much less bad in one direction than the other. Using vous where tu was natural sounds a little stiff and nobody minds for long. Using tu where vous was expected can read as overfamiliar, and with someone serving you it can read as talking down to them. When you genuinely cannot tell, vous is the cheaper mistake.
- Does this cover the verb endings too?
- Not in the round, which is about the choice itself. The endings and the four other things that move with the pronoun, the possessive, the reflexive, the object pronoun and the imperative, are set out in the article this page sits next to.