Top 10 Advanced French Mistakes

If you speak French at an advanced level, congratulations! You may not be fluent yet, but you're definitely on your way. Nonetheless, there are probably a few concepts you can use a bit of help with. Oftentimes these are small details that don't affect your listener's comprehension, but mistakes are mistakes and if you want to be fluent you need to avoid them. Here are the ten most common French mistakes and difficulties for advanced speakers, with links to lessons.


French Mistake 6 - Le facultatif

As an advanced French speaker, you should be very familiar with le as a definite article and direct object pronoun. What you may not know is that there are two optional uses of le. The neuter object pronoun le is an optional, formal construction found most commonly in written French, and l' is sometimes used in front of on to increase euphony in French.
Neuter object pronoun | On vs l'on | Euphony


French Mistake 7 - Indefinite French

I find that one of the hardest things to translate into another language is indefiniteness, such as anyone, something, everywhere, all the time. This index includes links to lessons on every kind of indefiniteness, from indefinite adjectives to the indefinite subject pronoun on.
Indefinite French


French Mistake 8 - Impersonal French

Grammatically speaking, impersonal refers to words or structures which are invariable; that is, they do not specify a grammatical person. This is, like indefiniteness, a fairly difficult concept for many students of French.
Impersonal French


French Mistake 9 - Reflexive vs Object Pronouns

Reflexive pronouns are used with pronominal verbs, while object pronouns are used with transitive verbs, and they have very different purposes. Yet they cause problems for many students due to the issue of agreement with pronouns that precede a compound verb. Before you worry about agreement, though, you need to be sure you understand the difference between reflexive and direct object pronouns - how to use them, separately and together.
Reflexive pronouns | Direct object pronouns | Double object pronouns


French Mistake 10 - Agreement

I can almost guarantee that you have trouble with some aspect of agreement, because even native speakers have trouble with it sometimes! There are numerous types of agreement, but the most difficult tend to be agreement with direct objects that precede compound verbs and with pronominal verbs. You'll find lessons on these and all other types of agreement on the following page.
Agreement


Advanced French Mistakes 1 - 5 | Advanced French Mistakes 6 - 10
High-Intermediate French Mistakes 1 - 5 | High-Intermediate French Mistakes 6 - 10
Intermediate French Mistakes 1 - 5 | Intermediate French Mistakes 6 - 10
Beginning French Mistakes 1 - 5 | Beginning French Mistakes 6 - 10

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