My house and my home Lesson 21 of the french course of Mova's primary school: 15 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 .
1 The word's gender has nothing to do with you: a boy says ma chambre and a girl says ma chambre too, because chambre is a feminine word. 2 Picture showing a French penpal round your house: "Voici la cuisine, à côté il y a le salon, et ma chambre est au premier étage" - here is the kitchen, next to it the living room, and my bedroom is one floor up. 3 Floors are counted as in Britain: the floor at street level is le rez-de-chaussée and le premier étage is one floor up, so an American's "first floor" is a French ground floor. 4 Small words do big jobs: chez moi means "at my house", à côté de means "next to", and you say à before a town but en before most countries, like J'habite à Cardiff, au pays de Galles. 5 J'habite dans une maison means "I live in a house"; maison is feminine (une maison) and appartement is masculine (un appartement, a flat). 6 Le rez-de-chaussée is the ground floor and le premier étage is the first floor up, as in the UK; in the US the "first floor" is the ground floor. 7 La chambre is the bedroom, la salle de bains is the bathroom, and a room in general is une pièce. 8 La cuisine means the kitchen and also the cooking, which is why English says "French cuisine". 10 You say à before a town (à Inverness), en before most feminine countries (en Écosse, en France), au before masculine countries (au Canada, au pays de Galles) and aux before plural ones (aux États-Unis). 11 Un jardin (a garden) is masculine and sounds like "zhar-DAN": a soft zh at the start and a nasal ending with no clear n. 12 Le grenier is the attic; the word comes from grain, which was once stored up there. 13 La cave is the cellar, not a cave; a cave in a hill is une grotte. 14 Chez means "at the home of": chez moi (at my house), chez toi (at yours), chez mamie (at granny's). 15 Le salon is the living room (masculine) and la salle à manger is the dining room (feminine, because salle is feminine). 16 You say ma chambre, not mon chambre, because mon and ma follow the gender of the word, not of the person speaking. ← previous In the classroomnext → The town and directions↑ back to French This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/french/21-my-house-and-my-home/