Kilo Lingo

French · Chapter 13 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer

Adverbs ment

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

Build the adverb off the feminine

The -ment adverb hangs off the feminine adjective, not the masculine: lent gives lente gives lentement, doux gives douce gives doucement. The exception is a masculine that already ends in a vowel, which takes -ment straight: vrai gives vraiment, never vraiement.

Parle plus doucement, s'il te plaît.

Speak more gently, please.

-amment and -emment sound identical

Constamment and évidemment rhyme exactly; the a and the e make no difference to the ear. So you cannot spell these by sound, you spell them from the adjective: -ant gives -amment (courant, couramment) and -ent gives -emment (évident, évidemment).

Évidemment, elle avait raison.

Obviously, she was right.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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Lesson 3 of 11 in this chapter

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