En voyage

Travelling puts you in front of more strangers per day than any other activity, which makes it the fastest way to get the tu and vous question wrong repeatedly.

The default

Every stranger is vous. The hotel receptionist, the guard checking tickets, the person in the next seat, the man who sells you a coffee. All vous, all the time, regardless of their age or apparent informality.

The cost of getting this wrong runs one way. Excessive formality makes you look careful. Excessive familiarity makes you look like you have not understood where you are.

How the switch happens

It is offered, never assumed. Somebody says on peut se tutoyer or on se dit tu ?, and from that moment it changes. Until then you wait, however friendly the conversation has become.

Deciding for yourself that you have arrived at tu is the actual mistake. It signals either that you think you outrank the other person or that you did not know there was a question.

Vous changes more than the pronoun

The verb moves with it, and so does the possessive:

• Vous allez à Lyon ?
• Je vous laisse ma place.
• C'est votre valise ?

Votre, not ton. Learners routinely get the pronoun right and then leak tu back through a possessive two words later, which sounds worse than not trying, because it reads as pretence.

Getting somewhere

Aller is to go, partir is to leave, quitter is to leave something behind and needs an object: je quitte Paris, never je quitte on its own. Sortir is to go out of an enclosed space.

Arriver has a second life meaning to happen: qu'est-ce qui est arrivé ? is what happened, not what arrived.

Left, right and the trap in between

Gauche is left. Droite is right as a direction. Droit without the e is straight ahead, and also a right in the legal sense, and also the adjective straight. Tout droit is straight on; à droite is to the right. One letter separates directions that will send you to opposite ends of a street.