A warm welcome back to our French word of the week blog. In this edition, we’re looking at the verb croire.
To hear how to pronounce the verb in its infinitive form, listen to the audio clip below:
There aren’t many complicated options as far as the translation goes – the verb croire means to believe in English. That said, one slight difficulty for learners is that croire does not fit into the pattern for conjugating regular -re verbs in French. When it comes to irregular -re verbs like this, the only solution is to learn the pattern and memorise it: you can do so by taking a look at our conjugation table for croire.
Ready to look at some examples? Let’s see how you might use croire in everyday French – you’ll probably notice the irregular conjugations right away!
Je crois qu’elle est partie il y a longtemps. I believe she left some time ago.
Il croyait tout ce qu’on lui raconte. He used to believe everything that we’d tell him.
Les magazines people vous feront croire n’importe quoi. The gossip magazines will make you believe any old thing.
Nous croyons qu’il fera meilleur demain. We reckon the weather will be better tomorrow.
croire en / à quelque chose ou quelqu’un to believe in something or someone
Mes cousins croient en Dieu, mais ils ne vont pas souvent à l’église. My cousins believe in God, but they don’t go to church often.
Est-ce que tu ne me crois pas ? » « Mais si, je te crois ! » “Don’t you believe me?” “Yes, I do believe you!”
J’espère que tout le monde croira la vérité. I hope that everyone will believe the truth.
Vous trouverez cette histoire très difficile à croire. You’ll find this story very difficult to believe.
Elles ont cru la voir, sans doute. They believed they saw her, without a doubt.
à en croire quelqu’un / quelque chose if someone/something is to be believed; according to someone/something
C’est une belle affaire, à en croire les experts. It’s a good deal, according to the experts.
croire en soi to believe in yourself; to have confidence in yourself
You might have noticed three common structures in our examples of croire:
- Croire without a preposition, followed directly by the thing that you’re believing;
- Croire followed by en or à;
- Croire followed by que.
Bear in mind that you’ll need to use the subjunctive for verbs following croire + que when croire is used in a negative construction or in a question. For example:
Je ne crois pas qu’il vienne chez nous. I don’t believe that he is coming to our house.
Croyez-vous que je mente ? Do you think that I’m lying?
Well done on adding a new French word to your vocabulary. Keep believing in yourself and you’ll be on the road to fluency in no time. See you next week for another word!
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.
