Welcome back to our weekly blog! Time to add yet another word to your French vocabulary – today’s word is the verb manquer.
Before delving into the translation and grammar, our audio clip will tell you how to pronounce it:
Let’s start with the meaning of manquer. While there are many different ways to translate and use this verb (as you’ll soon see in our examples), its most common meaning is to miss. You might also translate it as to lack, to miss out, to be missing or to not have enough of something.
The verb manquer follows a regular -er pattern in all tenses. If you want to learn more about how to conjugate this type of verb, visit our Easy Learning French Grammar pages on conjugation of regular -er verbs in the present indicative, the present subjunctive and the imperfect tense.
It’s time for a few examples to kick us off:
Je suis nul en tir à l’arc… j’ai manqué la cible. I’m rubbish at archery… I missed the target.
Appels manqués Missed calls (you might see this phrase in your phone)
à ne pas manquer must-see (literally ‘not-to-be-missed’)
manquer à sa parole to fail to keep your word
manquer de quelque chose to lack something
Ce plat manque de sel. This dish lacks salt.
Elle n’a pas aimé le roman parce qu’il manque de personnages forts. She didn’t like the novel because it lacks strong characters.
Si tu continues à manquer l’école, on devra te renvoyer. If you keep missing/skipping school, we will have to expel you.
manquer de faire quelque chose to nearly do something
Mon père a manqué de tomber dans les escaliers. My dad just about fell down the stairs.
While the translations we gave earlier might give the impression that manquer is a straightforward and regular verb, the fact that we chose this word for our blog suggests the opposite!
Be careful when you want to talk about missing somebody, as the structure isn’t quite what you’d expect. Imagine if you wanted to say I miss my brother:
Expected translation: Je manque mon frère.
Correct translation: Mon frère me manque.
The structure in question here is manquer à quelqu’un. Here are some more examples:
Mes parents me manquent. I miss my parents.
Vous me manquerez fort. I will really miss you all.
Est-ce que tes amis te manquaient ? Were you missing your friends?
Finally, another interesting grammatical use of manquer is as an impersonal verb. You can see below how the structure works differently from what we’ve already looked at:
Il manque… There is/are … missing.
Il manquait des objets. There were some objects missing.
Il manque encore deux joueurs. We’re still missing two players / We’re still two players short/down.
We hope that you enjoyed our Word of the Week blog. We’ll be back next Monday with a new word to study together. In the meantime, we hope you don’t miss us too much!
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.
