My last blog explained the importance of knowing the whole verb, as it can impact on French grammar in various ways. This blog will explain one of the ways in which knowing the whole verb will help you.

In this case, we are looking at asking a question in French that starts with “What……………..?”

Many of us are familiar with the question format:

 “Qu’est-ce que……?”, which allows us to ask   “What…….?

Throughout my studies, I assumed that this was the “go-to” format for asking a question, starting with the English interrogative adverb “What……..”.

How wrong I was!

Let’s take the verb “to eat”.

When we learn this verb, it is important to learn it in its entirety, i.e., manger quelque chose.

We can see that the verb is not followed by a preposition such as “de” or “à” and is, what I call, a “simple verb”.

So, let’s imagine we want to ask the question: “What are you eating?”.

As we know “manger” is a simple verb, we CAN safely use the qu’est-ce que format:

Qu’est-ce que tu manges?    

So far, so good, they cry!

However, let’s now look at a verb followed by the preposition “de”.

discuter de quelque chose = to discuss something

We would now like to translate the question:

 “What are you discussing?”

The following construction would be tempting:

Qu’est- ce que vous discutez de?    (Although understandable, it sounds a little odd!)

As we can see, we are left with what I like to refer to as a “floating de”!

We must, therefore, take the “de” into account, i.e.,

De quoi vous discutez?   What are you discussing?

As we can see, the preposition is brought to the front of the sentence and followed by “quoi”.

Let’s look at another example where the verb is followed by the preposition, “à”.

assister à quelque chose = to attend something

We would like to translate the following question:

What are they attending?

Again, we cannot use the “qu’est-ce que” format, as we will end up with a “floating à”.

The correct answer is, therefore:

A quoi ils assistent?                              

This principle works for all verbs followed by a preposition, such as “par”, “avec”, “sur”.