French word of the week: bien

Are you ready to expand your French vocabulary and knowledge? You’re in the right place with our French word of the week blog, where today we’re looking at the word bien.

Listen to the audio clip below to help you pronounce it correctly:

Bien is an extremely common word in French. It appears in numerous expressions and is very versatile in its use. In most cases it has pretty much the same translation in English, which is good or well.

Bien can be used as an adverb, adjective, or noun. Luckily, the meaning doesn’t change too much in each case.

Let’s start with some examples of the adverb:

Est-ce que tout va bien avec tes études ? Is everything going well with your studies?

Merci pour le repas, nous avons bien mangé. Thanks for the meal, we’ve eaten well.

Ma sœur joue très bien au foot. My sister plays football really well.

J’ai bien lu ses poèmes, mais je ne les aimais pas beaucoup. I certainly did read his poems, but I didn’t like them much.

Bien fait ! Well done!

Amuse-toi bien ! Have fun!

While it’s not something we need go into detail on now, you can do some extra reading on the irregular comparative and superlative forms of the adverb.

Moving on to the adjective, there’s an important piece of information to bear in mind. Bien does not need spelling changes for adjectival agreement. We call this type of adjective an invariable adjective, meaning its form never changes.

On to the examples:

être bien de faire quelque chose to be good to do something

Ce serait bien de vous rejoindre devant le métro. It would be good to meet you in front of the metro station.

Ce n’est pas bien de tricher ou de mentir. It’s not right to cheat or lie.

Le nouveau menu me paraît bien. The new menu seems pretty good to me.

« Tu te sens bien ? » « Oui, je suis bien. » “Are you feeling OK?” “Yes, I’m fine.”

Finally, we can see how it’s used as a masculine noun. Note that in this case, it also has a plural form, for which you just need to add -s to make biens.

Passer la journée a la campagne, ça fait vraiment du bien ! Spending a day in the countryside really does you good!

Je l’ai fait pour votre bien. I did it for your own good.

dire du bien de ; parler en bien de quelqu’un to speak well or speak highly of someone

les biens et les services goods and services

Ton oncle t’a laissé tous ses biens. Your uncle left all his possessions to you.

le bien et le mal good and evil

That’s it for our word of the week this week. Bien fait, you’ve done well to learn about this tricky word! Come back next time to find out what our next French word of the week will be.

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.