Welcome back to our blog! For this week’s vocabulary booster, we’ve chosen the word stage.
As you might recognise this word already in English, it’s important to listen to its French pronunciation in the audio clip below:
Yet again, it looks like we’re faced with a false friend. From our previous blogs, you might know that this is a word spelled the same as an English word, but without sharing the same meaning… In English, a ‘stage’ is a raised platform where you might perform something. Or it might be part of the instructions of a process, or a level of difficulty. However, in French, you might be quite surprised to find out that stage means ‘work experience’, an ‘internship’, or a ‘training course’. This is indeed a very strong example of a false friend!
Stage is a masculine noun, which you can make into a plural simply by adding -s on the end. If you’d like to find out more about this, check out our Easy Learning French Grammar page on making nouns plural.
Just before we get into the examples, we want to answer a burning question that we think you might have had. The French translation for the English word ‘stage’, as in somewhere you might perform, is scène. And for the meaning to be ‘stage’ as in a step within a process, the French word would be étape.
Now, let’s take a look at stage in action:
stageen entreprise work experience; work placement
stage pratique practical training (course); vocational training
stage pédagogique teacher training
faire un stage to do an internship
être en stage to be doing an internship
Ma fille va faire un stage chez Deloitte cet été. My daughter is going to do an internship at Deloitte this summer.
Vouz avez fait votre stage chez quelle entreprise ? Which company did you do your internship with?
Mara ne travaille plus ici. Ee fait, elle était en stage. Mara doesn’t work here anymore. In fact, she was doing work experience.
Finally, you might also find it useful to know about a related word to describe someone doing an internship or training course. You can use this as a noun or an adjective:
stagiaire intern; trainee
accueillir un stagiaire to welcome/to host/to have an intern
Quand j’étais stagiaire, on ne m’a rien payé ! When I was an intern, they didn’t pay me anything!
C’est le nouveau professeur stagiaire. It’s the new trainee teacher.
Thank you for reading our blog. Keep coming back every week to hear all about another word – think of it as your own personal training course in French vocabulary!
