Food and drink Lesson 18 of the french course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 French food words almost never stand alone: you like le pain (bread in general), but at the shop you ask for du pain (some bread). 2 When you ask for some of something, use du, de la, de l' or des: du lait, de la confiture, de l'eau, des pommes. 3 Picture a café in Calais: Charlotte orders des chips, expecting hot chips, and gets a bag of crisps, because in France hot chips are des frites. 4 Food names often hide a little story: pain perdu, "lost bread", is French toast, made from old bread that is saved instead of thrown away. 5 J'aime le pain means "I like bread"; after aimer, adorer, détester and préférer you use le, la, l' or les for things in general. 6 "Some" is du (masculine), de la (feminine), de l' (before a vowel) or des (plural): Je voudrais du pain (I'd like some bread). 7 des frites are chips (French fries) and des chips are crisps. 8 un pain au chocolat and une chocolatine are the same pastry; in the south-west of France many people say chocolatine, and people joke about which word is right. 9 le fromage ("fro-MAZH") is cheese; France has hundreds of cheeses, and in a French meal cheese often comes after the main course and before dessert. 10 Before a vowel sound, le and la lose their vowel: de l'eau (some water), l'orange. 11 les escargots are snails cooked in garlic butter, a famous dish many French children eat only on special occasions; Non merci is a polite way to say no. 12 After an amount French uses de: un kilo de pommes, une bouteille d'eau, un paquet de chips; kilo is masculine. 13 une fraise is a strawberry, une framboise is a raspberry and une myrtille is a blueberry. 14 le pain perdu ("lost bread") is French toast: old bread soaked in egg and milk and fried. 15 Je n'aime pas les légumes means "I don't like vegetables": with like and dislike, les stays even after pas. 16 In Brittany une crêpe is a thin, usually sweet pancake, and une galette is a buckwheat pancake, usually savoury, with ham, cheese or egg. 17 Slang here: "la" (Liverpool) means mate; "bare" (London) means lots of; "me mam" (Leeds) means my mum; "wicked" (Boston) means very; "proper lush" (West Country) means really lovely; "my lover" (West Country) means dear; "y'all" (Texas) means you all. ← previous Clothesnext → At the café: ordering in French↑ back to French This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/french/18-food-and-drink/