how long are you here in french

There are a number of ways of forming questions in French and the ins and outs of some of them
are rather complicated. But 99 per cent of the time, you don’t need the complicated forms.
Here are some simple rules of thumb to get you through.

In relaxed spoken French (i.e. probably in about 95% of usage), the following is generally all you need
to remember:

It is also often possible to use est-ce que with partial questions and
that is the normal way to use pourquoi:

The construction qu’est-ce que… (and not quoi est-ce que…) is also a very common way of asking what… questions:

When the question would begin with a preposition, it’s less usual to use est-ce que.
So one would tend to say tu travailles avec qui? rather than
%avec qui est-ce que tu travailles?.
how long are you here in french

In formal speech and writing:

In formal French, it is possible and usual to form a question by inverting the order of
the subject and the verb. In English, most verbs require ‘do’ support: do you work?
In French, no extra verb is required, but to ensure life isn’t too easy, there are other complications instead:

These third person pronouns all begin with a vowel. When the verb is placed before one of
these pronouns, a -t- sound will always occur between the verb and the pronoun.
If the spelling of the verb doesn’t already end in a t sound (either spelt -t
or -d), then one is added explicitly:

When the subject is a noun phrase (i.e. not a pronoun), it may, depending on the circumstances:

Be inverted directly with the subject (I will call this the ‘basic form’):

Be placed before the verb with an extra pronoun insreted; the pronoun and verb are then inverted.
I will call this the ‘extended form’:

The following table gives an indication of when each form is possible, with examples.

Inversion with je is reasonably common with a handful of common short verbs
or in the odd set expression:

Other than that, inversion with je occurs only in literary usage.

Correct Your French Blunders

For basic to intermediate students. See the chapter Questions and Answers (pp. 252-274) for further examples of questions. Although it does not handle the tu pars quand? type of question, this book does go into detail on other types of questions plus gives handy lists of expressions for translating particular question words from English into French. Three pages of exercises (with answers) are also provided. See this site’s review of Correct Your French Blunders.

Comprehensive French Grammar

See sections 581-593 for information on direction questions, plus the following sections on indirect questions. This book is less prescriptive and aimed at more advanced students; it also includes information on slang question forms such as combien que je vous dois?.

Foundations of French Syntax

For advanced university-level students, Chapter 10 of this book (Inversion and QU-movement) devotes some 70 pages to question forms and related structures. It is aimed at readers studying syntax from a technical perspective, and goes into detail on fine points such as the (marginal) grammaticality of ??la question de si Jean partira, the grammaticality difference between je ne sais pas pourquoi/comment le faire or the grammaticality difference between l’homme à la femme de qui j’ai téléphoné and l’homme la femme de qui j’ai insultée.

 French grammar index French-English dictionary English-French dictionary

10