Language notes

j’aime les chiens
This brings together a construction from a previous episode with some new vocabulary. Your child will probably be quite comfortable with j’aime and j’adore by now, so adding on the words for different animals shouldn’t be too big a step. There are a couple of things to watch out for. First of all, notice that in French we say the equivalent of “the dogs”, les chiens, so, remember to use the word for “the” when saying which animals you like. Secondly, do pay close attention to Mathilde for pronunciation here. The word chiens sounds a bit like someone sneezing: it’s a soft “ch-” at the start of the word and a silent -s at the end making it plural. The middle part of the word is quite nasal, almost swallowed, a bit like a dainty sneeze!

j’aime les chats
This follows the same pattern as the previous phrase and the word for “cat” has only one extra letter than the English equivalent, so hopefully that makes it easy to remember. Again, chats has a soft ch- at the start, more of a “sh-” sound, and a silent, plural -s at the end.

tu as un animal à la maison?
This question isn’t really as daunting as it may seem at first. It is just made up of lots of little words. Emma and Mathilde break it down really well in the episode and draw the comparison with the previously heard question, tu as des frères ou des sœurs? Animal is a very straightforward word to understand and maison has been seen in previous episodes about the home. When your son or daughter sees familiar words in new contexts it can boost their confidence to work out the meanings of new phrases. Sometime the smaller, connecting words can prove to be tricky, e.g: à, so it worth drawing attention to their meanings and point out the importance of accents to spelling as well as meaning of words. The question literally means “you have an animal at the house?”

j’ai un poisson rouge
Your child will again identify the start of this answer from the episode on talking about brothers and sisters; j’ai… means “I have…”. The word for “goldfish” isn’t too much of a stumbling block, as they have come across colours before, though they may find it unusual that it is called a “fish red” in French (though normally they are orange, not really gold, as we refer to them in English!) Poisson starts with a “pwa-” sound in French. Mathilde repeats this with Emma to get it just right.

Close-up

You may have noticed in this episode that the plural for animal is animaux. There are some other animals that form their plural in a similar way. e.g: un cheval is “a horse”, but in the plural, “the horses” is written as les chevaux. Nouns in French which end in -al form their plural by changing the -al to -aux. This rule does not only apply to animals e.g: “a newspaper” is un journal, but “the newspapers” is translated as les journaux.

Cultural points

If the UK is supposed to be a nation of pet lovers, the French may be even more so! French people love their dogs too. Often, they are kept to guard the house, or even as a fashion accessory, but they are very popular. Pets are far more widely accepted in shops and even restaurants in France, and they can stay over in many hotels, with a special room rate for dogs! There are even cimetières des chiens (dog cemeteries) in several of the big cities in France for when peoples’ pets die.