Welcome back to our French learners! It’s time to improve your vocabulary by learning more about a new word of the week. This time, we’ve chosen the verb sembler.
You can play our audio clip below to hear the pronunciation:
To translate sembler, you might be able to use your English vocabulary to find something similar to help with the meaning. Thinking of the words ‘semblance’ or ‘resemblance’, which refer to the quality of seeming or appearing to be like something, we might be able to link them to our French verb… Sembler does indeed translate as ‘to seem’, ‘to appear’ or ‘to look (like)’.
Sembler is a regular -er verb with a fully regular conjugation pattern – phew! If you need to brush up on French conjugation patterns, you can visit our Easy Learning French Grammar pages. We have information on regular -er verbs in the present indicative, present subjunctive and imperfect tense. It’s also worth noting that this is an intransitive verb, meaning it doesn’t need to take an object when it’s used in a sentence.
For our examples of how to use sembler, we’ve divided this into two fairly distinct categories. We’ll start with examples of sembler followed by an adjective. Then we’ll look at some common usages of following sembler with another verb.
Cette idée ne me semble pas très facile. This idea doesn’t seem very easy to me.
Quand il fait beau, les jours semblent plus longs. When it’s sunny, the days seem much longer.
Elle nous a semblé inquiète. She seemed worried to us.
Notre prof semblait préoccupé quand nous sommes arrivés. Our teacher seemed preoccupied when we arrived.
Now let’s look at some common examples followed by another verb infinitive:
sembler faire quelque chose to seem to do something
sembler être to seem/appear to be
Vous semblez le regretter, n’est-ce pas ? You seem to regret it, no?
Les élèves semblent savoir ce qu’ils doivent faire. The students appear to know what they need to do.
Mon chien vient de manger, mais il semble avoir faim. My dog just ate, but he seems to be hungry.
Finally, you’ll often see and hear sembler used impersonally. French impersonal verbs are only used with il, but this subject doesn’t refer to anything specific. We do this in a similar way in English when we use ‘it’. Let’s look at some examples:
il semble (que)… it seems/appears (that)….
Il semble important d’y aller. It seems important to go there.
Il ne semble pas que tout aille bien. It doesn’t look like things are going well. (Note that the subjunctive is sometimes used after ‘il semble que’.)
Thanks for reading our blog – you seem to be picking up the new vocabulary quite well! We hope that you’ll join us for another word next week.
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.
