Welcome back to all of our French learners! Today, our word of the week blog is looking at the verb suivre.
As always, we’ll start with the pronunciation of the verb infinitive:
The next thing you’ll need to know is how to translate this verb into English. Most commonly, suivre means to follow. But like most of our French words of the week, it has multiple translations including to keep up, to do and to pay attention to.
Suivre is an -re verb, but does not follow the conjugation pattern for regular -re verbs. As an irregular verb, there’s no other way round learning suivre than memorising its conjugations. Hopefully our examples will help you with this:
Vous n’avez pas suivi les instructions. You haven’t followed the instructions.
Cette nouvelle route suivra le bord du lac sur deux kilomètres. This new road will follow the edge of the lake for two kilometres.
On verra dans l’exemple qui suit que cette formule ne marche pas. We’ll see in the following example that this formula doesn’t work.
Je suis un cours d’espagnol à l’école. I’m doing a Spanish course at school.
We’re going to pause our examples here to explain something important. In the expression above, suivre is conjugated in the first-person present tense (as you’ll see if you check the verb table for suivre). However, most readers who have a grasp of basic French will already know je suis to mean I am (from the irregular verb être).
As both verbs have the exact same first-person present tense spelling, this is a great example of why you need to understand the context by reading the whole sentence before attempting to translate it.
Let’s get back to the examples:
Je ne suivais pas leur conversation. I wasn’t following their conversation.
Est-ce que tu as suivi le dernier match de foot ? Did you follow/watch the most recent football game?
Nous avions du mal à suivre les sous-titres japonais. We were struggling to keep up with the Japanese subtitles.
Vous me suivez ? Are you listening to me?; Are you following what I’m saying?
à suivre to be continued
suivre son cours to take/run its course
You might also encounter suivant(e) – which comes from the present participle of suivre – as an adjective to mean next or following:
Je vais regarder l’épisode suivante. I am going to watch the next episode.
On s’est vus le jour suivant. We saw each other following day.
We really appreciate all of the readers who have been following our word of the week blog for a while. If you’re new to our blog, why not come back next week to widen your French vocabulary even further? See you then!
Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
