It’s that time again… welcome back to our French word of the week blog! Today we’re looking at the word instant.
Listen to the audio clip below to hear the correct pronunciation:
You might be thinking that you could guess the translation of this word, as we have the exact same word in English. While this can sometimes help us to work out meanings, you’ll also run the risk of it being a ‘false friend’.
In this case, the French masculine noun instant has some similarities to the English word in terms of what it means. However, it doesn’t translate directly to ‘instant’.
The usual English translation for instant is moment, but you’ll mainly see it in set phrases to do with short passages of time (as you’ll see in our examples below). In English, we also use it like an adjective, such as ‘instant coffee’ or ‘instant gratification’, but this does not work in French – instant can only ever be used a noun.
To find further information on nouns, visit our Easy Learning Grammar section on nouns.
Ready for some examples? As a very common word in spoken French, it’s really worth remembering some of these set phrases using instant:
dans un instant in a moment
pour l’instant for just now; for the time being
à l’instant this very moment; just now
à chaque instant all the time; constantly; at every moment
en un instant in an instant; in no time at all
Mettez la table s’il vous plaît, tout le monde arrive à l’instant. Set the table please, everyone is just about to arrive.
Quand il m’a fait sa demande en mariage, l’espace d’un instant, j’ai cru qu’il rigolait. When he asked me to marry him, for just a moment, I thought he was having a laugh.
Dépêchez-vous ! Il ne vous reste que quelques instants. Hurry up! You only have a few moments left.
Dès l’instant qu’on s’est vus, je me suis mis en colère. From the moment / As soon as we saw each other, I got angry.
Est-ce que tu peux attendre un instant ? Can you wait a moment?
Pour l’instant, je préférerais rester ici avec ma famille. I’d prefer to stay here with my family for the time being / for now.
Congratulations – you learned a brand-new French word just a moment ago! As your language skills and vocabulary continue to improve, we hope you’ll keep visiting our blog to learn even more. See you next time.
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.
