With the start of another week, comes the learning of another French word! This time, we’ve chosen the word chez. Some of you might have seen or heard it before, but let’s listen to the pronunciation because we get into the details:
Chez is a particularly interesting word of the week, because we have absolutely nothing like it in English. To try getting a sense of its translation, we need to use several words to get the same point across – chez most commonly means ‘at the house of [someone]’ or ‘at [someone’s] house’. This means you’ll often see it alongside someone’s name. It’s also used with job titles or professions to talk about going to a shop, business or service, which ends up translating as ‘at’ or ‘to’.
As a preposition, chez is a very common, everyday word. It’s extremely useful, even if you find it a bit difficult to get to grips with at first! For more information, you can check out our Easy Learning French Grammar page on how to use prepositions.
As always, the best way to learn how to use our new word, is by looking at some examples in context:
Elle n’est pas là, elle est chez sa copine. She’s not there, she’s at her girlfriend’s house.
Étais-tu chez toi ? Were you at (your) home?
Vous pouvez rester chez moi, mais je dois travailler pendant la journée. You can stay at my house, but I have to work during the day.
Passe par chez nous ce soir. Come by ours / our house tonight.
Je serai chez Adama jusqu’à seize heures. I’ll be at Adama’s house until four o’clock.
Now we’ve looked at examples of using chez to talk about houses and homes, we can look at examples of businesses and jobs:
chez le boulanger at/to the baker’s
chez le dentiste at/to the dentist
Je ne vais pas chez le coiffeur. I’m not going to the hairdresser’s.
Je n’étais pas chez le coiffeur. I wasn’t at the hairdresser’s.
Mon oncle travaillait chez Pernod. My uncle used to work at Pernod.
You might have also seen chez in the names of French restaurants in particular, which we might translate like so:
Chez Jean-Claude Jean-Claude’s
Chez Yvette Yvette’s Place
Finally, you can also use chez to describe characteristics of certain person or a group:
On ne trouve que cette technique chez Molière. We only see this technique in (the works of) Molière.
Je sais que c’est bizarre, mais chez elle, c’est une habitude. I know it’s odd, but with/for her, it’s normal.
Ils ont étudié ces comportements chez les autruches. They studied these behaviours in ostriches.
That’s all we have for this week chez Collins! We hope that you’ll take your learnings away to continue studying at home – we’ll see you here again 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.
