A topic that frequently comes up, for example in GCSE exams, is talking about a holiday, either future or past. This means that it's useful to know:
- the past tense
- the aller + infinitive construction for talking about the future
- some French holiday vocab
Past tense
When you're talking about a sequence of things that happened in the past, you'll generally use the
perfect tense. A few verbs, notably
aller, actually use
être instead of avoir. And various irregular verbs have irregular past participles. As mentioned in the
French holiday vocab section, some important irregular forms for describing a holiday are:
je suis allé a ...
I went to...
on est allés a ...
we went to...
j'ai pris (le train etc)
I took ...
je suis arrivé à (midi)
I arrived at (midday)
Talking about future holiday plans
For talking about planned events in the future, you usually don't need the future tense. Some more common ways to express the future are:
Je vais +
infinitive
I'm going to...
e.g.
Je vais passer deux semaines en Espagne.
I'm going to spend two weeks in Spain.
J'espère +
infinitive
I'm hoping to ...
Then you can use these with other persons (learn the
present tense of aller to know what form to use instead of "je vais"). For example:
mon frère va venir avec moi
my brother's going to come with me
French holiday vocab
Some useful
vocab for describing holidays is given in the
French phrases section of the web site. This includes names of places and names of modes of transport.
For GCSE, you need to learn a few basics: e.g. "London", "Paris", "France", "Spain", "beach" how to say "we went to...", "I went with ...", one or two weather expressions etc. Most of these are covered on the holiday vocab page just mentioned. You don't need to learn the more advanced expressions like "I was eaten by mosquitoes", but if you can learn
one or two of these, it'll add a bit of variety to what you're saying.
Also, learn some
food vocabulary so you can talk about what you ate on holiday.
Some phrases to help you say what you thought of a holiday / activity include:
Je me suis bien amusé.
I had a great time.
Ça a été.
It was OK.
C'était génial!
It was great!
C'était pas terrible.
It wasn't great.
Hope that helps! If you think I've missed anything off, please leave a comment on this thread!