Another week, another French word of the week blog! Today we’ll be studying the verb paraître.
As a French learner, you might not yet have encountered a word with a ‘hat’ on the letter î – this is called a circumflex. Don’t panic, you can hear how to pronounce the word correctly by pressing play on the audio clip below:
While the French verb paraître does have a very distinct meaning and concept, we can use a few different English verbs in translation:
- To seem
- To look
- To appear
- To be apparent
Bear in mind that when we translate it as ‘to look’ in English, it doesn’t mean to look with your eyes, that would be the verb regarder. It means something or someone seems or appears or looks a certain way.
Before we get into the examples, we know a lot of you might have started picking up the rules about conjugating regular -re verbs. But we’re afraid to say that as an irregular verb, paraître does not stick to these rules… If you’d like to learn the conjugations for this irregular verb off by heart, have a look at our verb table for paraître.
Now we’ll have a look at how and why you might use paraître:
Tu paraissais triste ce matin… tout va bien ? You seemed sad this morning, is everything ok?
Monica et Adem n’ont pas paru à la réunion. Monica and Adem didn’t show up/appear at the meeting.
Tout le monde dit qu’il paraît plus âgé que sa sœur. Everyone says that he looks older than his sister.
Elle m’a paru très nerveuse de nous parler. To me, she seemed very nervous to speak to us.
(faire) paraître un ouvrage/un roman/un essai to publish a work/novel/essay
Son livre paraîtra l’année prochaine. Her book will be published / will come out next year.
As well as these common usages, another key use of paraître is as an impersonal verb. You’ll notice that its structure is the same as the previous examples:
Il paraît que…. It seems (that)… / Apparently…
à ce qu’il paraît… from what it seems…
Paraît-il bizarre qu’il n’a pas appelé ? Doesn’t it seem strange that he hasn’t called?
Cet ordinateur est cassé à ce qu’il paraît. From what it seems, this computer is broken.
It appears that we’ve come to the end of our blog for this week! We’d love to welcome you back next time to shed some light on a new French word – but remember that it’s never as hard as it looks.
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.
