Ready to improve your French vocabulary with another word of the week blog? For today’s word, we’ve chosen to look at lui.
You can listen to the audio clip below to hear how to pronounce it:
The first and most important point to make is that lui is a pronoun – a word we use in place of a noun. In this case, the English equivalents would be ‘him’, her’ or ‘it’. For more information on this topic, check out the articles in our Easy Learning French Grammar section on pronouns.
Lui is an indirect object pronoun. The indirect object pronoun usually comes before the verb in French. When you use it like this, depending on the subject, you can translate lui as to him or to her in English – the translation of lui will match the gender of the subject:
Matthieu n’est pas là. Tu devras lui parler demain matin. Matthieu isn’t here. You’ll need to speak to him tomorrow morning.
- From parler à quelqu’un (to speak to someone)
Elle ne comprend pas ce je lui ai appris. She doesn’t understand what I taught her.
- From apprendre quelque chose à quelqu’un (to teach someone something)
« Est-ce que on va donner un cadeau à Monsieur Verbier ? » « Non, il ne faut pas lui donner un cadeau. » “Are we going to give a present to Mr Verbier?” “No, we don’t need to give him a present.”
- From donner quelque chose à quelqu’un (to give someone something)
As well as being a functional indirect object pronoun, as per the examples we’ve covered already, you can also use lui for emphasis. Usually, this ‘emphatic pronoun’ comes after a preposition. One important point to make about emphatic lui is that it always means he or him (the emphatic pronoun elle is used for she or her).
For more information, see our pages on what emphatic pronouns are and when to use emphatic pronouns.
lui-même himself
à lui seul all by himself
Je ne veux voir que lui. I only want to see him.
« C’est ton livre ? » « Non, c’est à lui. » “Is this your book?” “No, it’s his. / No, belongs to him.”
Elle est moins sympa que lui. She’s less friendly than him.
Sometimes French speakers double up the subject pronoun with the emphatic pronoun for verbal emphasis, but this doesn’t always need a direct translation into English.
« Il est où, Noah ? » « Lui, il passe cette semaine en Italie. » “Where is Noah?” “He’s spending this week in Italy.”
That’s all we have to share for now on lui – we hope that it’s been helpful to cover the different uses of this small but important word. See you next week for more French vocabulary!
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.
