Negation & Questions

Negation

One of the first things learners trip on: in a negative sentence, the indefinite/partitive article before a direct object — un/une/des/du/de la — all collapse into de — "Je n'ai pas de voiture" (never pas une voiture).

Basic structure: ne + verb + pas

• Je ne parle pas français. (I don't speak French.)
• Il n'aime pas le café. (He doesn't like coffee.)

💡 Intuition: ne … pas is like a pair of parentheses wrapping the whole conjugated verb. In compound tenses, what they wrap is not the past participle but the auxiliary — ne + auxiliary + pas + past participle (Je n'ai pas mangé).

Other negative words

In speech: ne is often dropped → "Je sais pas", "C'est pas vrai". TCF listening: be ready to spot negative sentences with the ne dropped.

🔴 Do not carry spoken French's dropped ne into your writing

In everyday speech French drops the ne almost every time: « Je sais pas », « C'est pas vrai ». Written down it is simply an error — and it is the single largest source of negation mistakes in our correction data: 107 corrections restore a ne…pas, and a further 64 add back a ne on its own. That is an order of magnitude more than every other negation structure combined.

💡 This is a register slip, not a grammar gap. The rule is blunt: if it is written down, no ne may be dropped — emails, essays, anything formal. Conversely, in TCF listening the speaker will drop it, and you have to recognise it. One phenomenon, two different standards for producing and for understanding.

⚠️ A related frequent one: "not … either" is non plus, never aussi. ❌ Le parking n'est pas difficile aussi　✅ Le parking n'est pas difficile non plus aussi belongs to affirmative sentences only; negate the sentence and it must become non plus.

Negation in compound tenses

ne + auxiliary + pas + past participle:

• Je n'ai pas mangé. (I didn't eat.)
• Elle n'est pas venue. (She didn't come.)

⚠️ The nastiest one: after negation the article becomes de, and ne…que is not a negation at all

Three high-frequency traps, cleared up at once:

🔑 rien / jamais / plus sit between the auxiliary and the participle (n'ai rien vu); only personne is thrown behind the participle (n'ai vu personne). Also, definite articles le/la/les do not change after negation: Je n'aime pas le café.

Three ways to ask a question

1. Rising intonation (most colloquial)

Just use a rising tone: Tu viens ? (Are you coming?)

2. Est-ce que (all-purpose)

Est-ce que + statement: Est-ce que tu viens ?

3. Inversion (most formal)

Verb-subject: Viens-tu ?

TCF strategy: all three show up in listening; inversion is more common in reading.

💡 Three things about questions do not fit on this page: the mechanics of inversion (including that -t-), the qu'est-ce qui / qu'est-ce que grid, and what happens when a question is embedded (si / ce que). They live on Asking questions.

Question words