French grammar C1: advanced
The complete guide from A1 to C1: the rules, examples to listen to, the usual mistakes.
At level C1, French is read in its literary form, written in a formal register and shaped with precision. No new verb form is produced at this level: the literary tenses of novels and history books are learnt for recognition, and the other points refine what B1 and B2 have built.
By the end of C1, you can
- read a novel or a history book in the passé simple and the passé antérieur, and retell it in the passé composé;
- recognise the literary subjunctive, qu’il fût, qu’il eût fini, and give its everyday equivalent;
- link ideas with the connectors of formal writing: de crainte que, d’autant plus que, à tel point que, encore que;
- use si in each of its values and frame a hypothesis with en admettant que or quand bien même;
- say how sure you are of a fact (il semble que, sans doute) and report news that is not confirmed;
- say the same thing in neutral and in formal French, and punctuate it in the French way.
Completed from B1 and B2
- emphasis with c’est… que and ce à quoi, and the word moved to the front and picked up by a pronoun;
- the passive, the nominal style and the forms in -ant;
- reference across sentences, the values of tout and the indefinite words.
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Literary narrative
Novels, tales, history books and some newspaper articles tell past events in a system of tenses of their own, the récit.
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Linking ideas
At B2, ideas were linked with the connectors of cause, result, purpose, opposition and concession of standard French: parce que, si bien que, pour que, bien que.
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Si and hypotheses
At B1 and B2, si introduced a condition, with a fixed pattern of tenses.
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Saying how sure you are
A statement can be made with more or less certainty.
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Emphasis and word order
In English, the word that matters is often stressed by the voice; in French, it is put in focus by the order of the sentence.
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Tout and reference
A text avoids repeating its nouns: what has been named is picked up by a pronoun, by ce dernier or celui-ci, by tel or de même, or by a more general noun.
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Voice and the noun group
Written French often puts the doer of an action in the background, with the passive, on or the pronominal passive, or turns a verb sentence into a noun phrase.
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Register and punctuation
French marks a formal register in its syntax as well as in its words: the subject is inverted after a few adverbs, ne is used alone with a few verbs, cela, nous and l’on replace ça and on, and letters have fixed formulas.