Welcome back to our French word of the week blog! In today’s edition, we’re taking an in-depth look at the verb mener.
Before we get started, listen to the audio clip to hear the pronunciation of its infinitive form:
There are a few different options for translating mener. You’ll see in our examples that it always depends on context, but its meanings include ‘to lead’, ‘to take/bring’, ‘to conduct’ and ‘to carry out’.
To conjugate mener, you can mostly follow the regular conjugation pattern for -er verbs. The complication is that it belongs to a group of verbs that change their first e to a grave accent è in certain tenses. But the best way to learn and memorise this is by checking out our verb table for mener.
Let’s look at some expressions and sentences using the verb in action:
Je peux mener la réunion ce matin. I can lead the meeting this morning.
Mariam mènerait très bien l’entreprise. Mariam would lead the company really well.
Il y avait deux présentateurs qui a mené le débat télévisé. There were two presenters who led the televised debate.
Le gouvernement menait une enquête sur les élections présidentielles. The government was conducting an inquiry into the presidential elections.
mener à to take to; to lead to
On vous mènera à l’hôpital. We’ll take you to the hospital.
Ce chemin mène à l’église. This path leads to the church.
mener dans to take into
mener quelqu’un à quelque chose to bring somebody to something
At this point, it’s worth introducing two more verbs which are closely related to mener. In fact, they’re so closely related that you’ll see the word mener sits within both of these verbs:
- emmener to bring/take
- amener to bring/take
So, why are there so many options? Because of the richness of French vocabulary, which can feel demanding at times!
- You can use emmener as the verb for taking someone or something away from somewhere.
- You can use amener as the verb for bringing someone or something along (with you) to wherever you’re going.
For both verbs, you can use them for taking or bringing things like people, animals, or vehicles, but not for something like an object that you’re carrying. For those verbs, we might have to cover them in another future blog…
We hope that you now feel more confident with using mener and its related variations. Keep coming back every week to read our blog, and it might end up leading you to French fluency in no 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.
