Our weekly blog examines different French words to help improve you improve your vocabulary and understanding. Today, we’ve chosen the verb monter.
Listen to the audio clip for the pronunciation of the verb in its infinitive form:
To translate monter, we can’t offer you one single-word equivalent, unfortunately. It means a whole range of different things, but most commonly something along the lines of to go up. This idea of upwards motion applies in many ways to its translations, including to get on, climb up, take up, put up and plenty more, depending on the context.
Despite being a bit complicated to translate, monter does follow a regular conjugation pattern for -er verbs. You can read about this on our Easy Learning French Grammar pages – find out about regular -er verbs in the present indicative, present subjunctive and imperfect tense.
We can now move on to look at some examples of monter in action. As per our previous point about how it can be used to mean a whole range of things in English, we’ll start with how you might use it intransitively. This means the verb does not need a direct object:
monter en ascenseur to go up in the lift
monter au grenier to go up into the attic
monter à pied to walk up on foot
Il y a deux heures qu’ils sont montés dans l’avion. They boarded the plane two hours ago.
Ce chemin monte aux chemins. This road goes up into the hills.
Est-ce que vous monteriez à cet arbre ? Would you climb up this tree?
Nous montons en voiture à l’instant. We’re getting in the car right this minute.
Next, let’s see some examples of the verb being used transitively. This means the verb needs a direct object for it to make sense:
Nous monterons les grands escaliers. We will go up / climb the big staircase.
L’année dernière, l’église a monté un spectacle pour Pâques. Last year, the church put on a show for Easter.
Normalement, les meubles d’Ikea sont très faciles à monter. The furniture from Ikea is usually very easy to assemble.
Mon collègue montera vos valises. My colleague will bring your suitcases up.
Just in case you didn’t notice a little grammatical distinction between the two uses of monter, it’s worth knowing this fact for the perfect and pluperfect tenses:
- When used intransitively, monter takes être for its auxiliary verb
- When used transitively, monter takes avoir for its auxiliary verb
Je suis monté sur une étagère. I got up onto a shelf.
J’ai monté une étagère. I put up a shelf.
We’re all done with our blog on monter – we hope that you learned some useful information about this verb. Your knowledge of French vocabulary is certainly on its way up! We’ll see you next time for our new word of the 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.
