Are you ready to expand your French vocabulary and understanding? You’re in the right place! Today in our word of the week blog, we’re studying the word combien.
First of all, have a listen to its pronunciation in the audio clip below:
Now it’s time to move on to what combien means. As we often mention in our blog, you need to be really wary when it comes to translating French words that look or sound similar to words in English. In this case, you might have already considered translating combien to the ‘combine’ or ‘combination’ – but you would be wrong!
When we translate combien, it doesn’t even have a direct English equivalent. Combien means how much or how many, which might feel hard to grasp at first because we don’t have a single word to express this idea.
While it is an adverb, you’ll start to notice that it’s particularly common in question form. But rather than getting hung up on the finer details of the grammar, the best thing to do is look at some examples of how combien works in everyday French – it’s a word you’re likely to hear a lot.
We’ll study combien in action below:
Vous voudriez combien de billets ? How many tickets would you like?
Combien de personnes viendront avec toi ? How many people will be coming with you?
Mon patron m’a demandé combien de jours de congé me reste. My boss asked me how many days of leave I have left.
Ça fait combien de temps que ta famille habite à Lyon ? How long has your family lived in Lyon?
Il y a combien de temps ? How long ago?
Personne ne comprend pas combien je l’aime ! Nobody understands how much I love her!
« Est-ce que tu veux deviner le prix ? » « Non, je n’aimerais pas savoir combien ça coute… » “Do you want to guess the price?” “No, I wouldn’t like to know how much that costs…”
Combien ça coûte ? How much is it?; How much does it cost?
À combien de mois en êtes-vous ? How far along are you? (this question might would be asked to someone who’s pregnant, and literally translates as ‘At how many months…’)
Good job on expanding and enriching your French grammar and vocabulary. How many more word of the week blogs do you reckon it’ll take until you feel more confident in French? If you keep coming back every week, we hope you might find out!
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.
