French word of the week: tourner

The start of a new week brings yet another French word for us to study. Today, we’re looking at the verb tourner.

As always, it’s best to start by listening to the pronunciation. You can find the audio clip below:

Although we generally advise against trying to find similar English words to translate the French, tourner does have one translation that you might have already considered. One of the most common translations of tourner is to turn, but other translations include to shoot a film, to change, or to go round something.

As well as the French word having a fairly clear link to its main English translation, the grammar is also quite easy to get to grips with. French learners will be pleased to know that tourner follows a regular -er pattern in all tenses. Hopefully this will make things easier when it comes to understanding our upcoming examples.

For more information, our Easy Learning French Grammar section offers pages on regular conjugation of -er verbs in the present indicative, the present subjunctive and the imperfect tense.

Let’s take a look at some situations where you might encounter the verb tourner:

N’avez-vous pas tourné à gauche au feu ? Did you not turn left at the lights?

Je tournais la clé quand mon père a ouvert la porte. I was turning the key when my dad opened the door.

Veuillez tourner à la page vingt-sept. Please turn to page twenty-seven.

Toutes les planètes tournent autour du soleil. All of the planets circle around the sun.

Patrice m’a offert un café au lait chez lui, mais le lait avait tourné. Patrice offered me a coffee at his house, but the milk had turned (sour).

Nous tournerons ce film à Lahore principalement. We’ll mainly be shooting this film in Lahore.

tourner de l’œil to faint; to pass out

tourner la tête to look away

mal tourner to take a turn for the worse; to turn nasty; to turn out badly

tourner à / en quelque chose to turn into something

Sa fête a vite tourné au cauchemar. Her party quickly turned into a nightmare.

As you might have noticed in our examples above, you can use this verb for someone or something literally doing the action of turning, as well as in more figurative contexts.

That’s another new word that you’ve learned about this week – you’ll turn into a confident French speaker in no time! We’ll see you here again 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.