131 - How to Say 'I Miss You' in French

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Transcript

Hello everyone! Bonjour à tous!  Welcome back to the French Made Easy podcast! This is episode number 131, numéro 131!

Today’s episode is part of our "Common Mistakes in French" series, where I highlight common beginner mistakes in French so you can simply avoid making those mistakes. And in this lesson, I’ll teach you how to say "I miss you" in French. Now it seems pretty straightforward at first glance, but I’ll explain in a minute why this expression is often quite complicated for beginners and I’ll share a mistake I often hear.

As always, for every one new on the podcast, make sure you have downloaded your lesson's cheat sheet so you can follow along as you listen. You'll find the download link in the episode notes. And no exercises for this particular episode.

Alright, so let's dive in.

When you want to say "I miss you" in French, you say "Tu me manques." That’s the short answer. If you’re just starting out, maybe simply try to remember that expression by heart. Just so you don’t get confused.

So ‘Tu me manques’ is ‘I miss you’. Now if you’re not quite starting out, and if you want to go a bit deeper because you’re thinking hmmm something doesn’t make sense here, isn’t this sentence backwards? ‘Tu’ means ‘you’, not ‘I.’ Something’s off.

So let’s breakdown that sentence.

• "Tu", is the subject pronoun (we’ve talk about it in episode 14 ) that means "you"
• "Me" is the indirect object pronoun, (if you’re in my French Grammar Made Easy course, you’ve heard about it If you’re not in my French Grammar Made Easy course, what are you waiting for 😜, come and join us, I’ll put a link to the course in the notes.) Now as I was saying, ”me” is the IOP, and it has a few different meaning possible, but to keep things simple, in that particular context, it means "by me"- showing who is feeling the emotion of missing someone.
• "Manques" is the conjugated form of the verb "manquer," (to miss) in the present tense.

So if we put it all of that together, and we do a word for word translation we have “you are missed by me”. Now that’s the literal word for word translation. “You are missed by me.” That’s how we say it in French.

But that doesn’t sound very natural to say that in English, so of course the translation is “I miss you.”

So when you want to translate accurately “I miss you” in French, you have to think of it as saying "you are being missed by me."

So really it’s the other way around from English, but that's just how we do it in French. In French, for that particular expression, the subject of the verb, is the person who is missed “tu” (you), and not “I”, not the person who is missing the other.

So the common mistake to avoid here, is to say: "Je te manque" because if you say that, then that’s the opposite of what we're aiming for, that means “you miss me” and not “I miss you”

If this episode was a bit confusing for you, don’t panic, it’s ok, just learn that little expression by heart, for now. “I miss you” in French is “tu me manques”.

So that’s it for today’s episode, I hope that was helpful! Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you next week.