Songs and rhymes Lesson 31 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 Songs are a clever way to learn: the tune carries the words into your memory, and many songs secretly teach numbers, body parts, clothes or how adjectives agree. 2 Picture a French classroom on a rainy afternoon: half the class sings "Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez-vous ?" and the other half starts a moment later, so the song chases itself round the room as a round. 3 Some songs are sillier or darker than they sound: "Alouette, gentille alouette" is a cheerful tune about plucking a lark's feathers, one body part at a time. 4 Others are games: in "Promenons-nous dans les bois" one child is the wolf, getting dressed piece by piece, until he shouts "J'arrive !" and chases everyone. 5 Frère Jacques is about a monk who has overslept: dormez-vous ? means "are you sleeping?" and sonnez les matines means "ring the bells for morning prayers"; in English the bells are already ringing. 6 Alouette means a lark; je te plumerai means "I will pluck your feathers", and each verse adds a body part: la tête, le bec, le cou, le dos. 7 Sur le pont d'Avignon: le pont is the bridge, on y danse means "people dance there" and tous en rond means "all in a circle"; the real bridge has only four arches left and stops in the middle of the river. 8 Many people say dancers really danced sous le pont, under the bridge, on an island in the river. 9 Au clair de la lune means "in the moonlight"; Pierrot is a sad clown with a white face, and prête-moi ta plume means "lend me your pen", an old feather pen. 10 Une souris verte is a silly rhyme about a green mouse running in the grass; it says verte, not vert, because souris is feminine. 11 In Promenons-nous dans les bois the wolf answers "Loup, y es-tu ?" with clothes he is putting on: ma chemise, mon pantalon, mes chaussettes. 12 Un, deux, trois, nous irons au bois is a counting rhyme where each number rhymes with the next line: trois and bois, six and cerises, douze and rouges. 13 Savez-vous planter les choux ? asks if you know how to plant cabbages, using a different body part in each verse: le doigt, le pied, le genou, le coude, le nez. 14 Il pleut, il pleut, bergère is a song from 1780: "It's raining, shepherdess, bring in your white sheep" - white sheep is blancs moutons. 15 Meunier, tu dors means "Miller, you are sleeping"; children sing it slower and then faster, like the mill wheel. ← previous Questions and simple sentencesnext → Christmas, Epiphany and pancake day French-style↑ back to French This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/french/31-songs-and-rhymes/