The four things that are genuinely hard, and one that is not

Everything above gets you saying French. What follows is what keeps intermediate learners busy for years, listed here so you know what you are up against rather than because you need it to order dinner.

Gender is not guessable and it occasionally changes the meaning. Every noun is masculine or feminine, the rule for which is largely absent, and the article carries information the noun does not: le livre is a book and la livre is a pound, le tour is a turn and la tour is a tower. Learn the article with the word, always, from the first day — going back to add genders later is an enormous and avoidable job.

French makes you say some where English says nothing. You cannot say I eat bread; you say je mange du pain, literally I eat of-the bread. That partitive — du, de la, des — is compulsory, has no English equivalent, and its absence is one of the loudest markers of a foreign speaker. It also flips to de after a negative: je ne mange pas de pain.

Spoken negation drops half of itself. The book gives ne… pas wrapped around the verb. Actual speech throws the ne away — je sais pas, j'ai pas faim, c'est pas grave — so if you are listening for ne as your signal that a sentence is negative, you will hear the opposite of what was said. Similarly, almost nobody says nous in conversation: on does the job, with a singular verb, so we're going is on y va.

And the false friends are unusually well-disguised, because English borrowed so heavily from French and then changed the meanings. Actuellement means currently. Éventuellement means possibly. Sensible means sensitive. Une librairie is a bookshop and une bibliothèque is the library. La monnaie is loose change. Blessé means injured. Un coin is a corner. And demander is simply to ask, with none of the force of the English word.

French is written for the eye and said for the ear

French keeps two systems running at once. The written language records a pronunciation that stopped being current several centuries ago, and the spoken language has moved on and left the letters behind — which is why beaucoup is five sounds spelled with eight letters and why ils parlent and il parle are said identically. Reading French aloud is therefore not a matter of decoding letters but of learning which ones have been retired, and the good news is that the rules are consistent: once you know them they do not spring surprises the way English does.

The habit that actually makes you comprehensible is rhythm. English marches — one syllable in every word gets stamped on and the rest are swallowed. French flows: every syllable gets roughly equal time, with a small lean on the last one of a group, and words run together so that a phrase is one unbroken unit of sound. Il y a comes out as a single syllable. Je ne sais pas is shpah in the mouth of anyone under seventy. If you say French words correctly but in an English rhythm, you will be understood with effort; if you get the rhythm right, small errors in the vowels stop mattering.

Six things a first-time visitor gets wrong

Le menu is not the menu. La carte is the list of everything the kitchen makes; le menu — often la formule at lunch — is a fixed-price set of two or three courses, chalked up outside and almost always the better deal. Asking for le menu and expecting the full list is the most common ordering mistake an English speaker makes in France.

Lunch service closes and it closes hard. In most of the country a kitchen serves from about noon to two and then stops until seven; arriving at half past two expecting food will get you a polite refusal from a restaurant that is visibly full of people eating. Service continu on the door means the exception. On top of that, a great many good restaurants close on Sunday evening and all day Monday, and much of the country's independent retail closes Sunday entirely.

Bread lives on the table, not on your plate. Put your piece of baguette directly on the cloth beside the plate — this is correct rather than rude — and tear it with your hands instead of cutting it. It is for eating with the meal and for wiping the plate at the end, which is also allowed, and it does not need butter.

Keep your hands on the table. The Anglo-American habit of resting the idle hand in your lap reads in France as slightly furtive; wrists or hands stay visible on the table either side of the plate, and elbows do not. It is the one table-manners rule that runs exactly opposite to what an English speaker was taught as a child.

Greet the room, not just the person. Entering a small shop, a waiting room, a lift or a compartment, the expected thing is a general bonjour — or bonjour messieurs-dames to a roomful — and a bonne journée or au revoir on the way out. Failing to greet is not shyness in French terms; it is the omission that makes a stranger seem rude, and it is behind a great deal of what visitors interpret as unfriendliness aimed at them.

In the boulangerie, ask for the better loaf. Une baguette gets you the standard industrial-dough stick. Une tradition — sometimes une baguette tradition — is the one made to a legally defined recipe with no additives and a long ferment, costs a few cents more, and is a completely different object. When you pay, put the coins in the small dish on the counter rather than into the assistant's hand; that dish is there for a reason and using it marks you as someone who has been in France before.

One official language, and it was made that way

France's linguistic unity is a policy outcome rather than a natural fact. At the Revolution a large minority of the country did not speak French at all, and the century that followed set out deliberately to change that: Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, Corsican, Basque, Flemish and Catalan were pushed out of schools and public life, sometimes with the punishments of children as the instrument. They survive — Breton is a Celtic language, cousin to Welsh; Occitan produced the troubadour poetry of the medieval south; Alsatian is Germanic — but they survive as heritage rather than as the language of the bus queue, and the state's relationship with them is still an argument.

The same instinct produced institutions no English speaker has an equivalent for. The Académie française has ruled on correct usage since 1635, and while its verdicts are advisory it is genuinely consulted. The Toubon law of 1994 requires French on product labelling, advertising and in workplaces. There is a formal process for inventing French words to replace English ones, and some of them stick. Behind the jokes about this lies something a visitor should take seriously: the French are not indifferent to their language, which is exactly why an attempt at it registers.

About the switching. Yes, you will speak French and be answered in English, and it is very rarely contempt — it is a service reflex, a busy person taking the fastest route, and in Paris often a genuine kindness. It is also easy to head off. Open with bonjour, add excusez-moi, je parle un peu français or je préfère pratiquer mon français, si ça ne vous dérange pas, and most people will stay in French and slow down. English proficiency here is better than its reputation among the young and in cities, and thinner than travellers assume in villages, in small shops, at rural stations and with anyone over sixty.

Vous is the default, and Madame does more than either

French makes you choose a pronoun every time you address one person. Vous is formal or plural; tu is familiar and singular. The verbs are different, the possessives are different, and the choice is so consequential that French has verbs for making it: vouvoyer and tutoyer. As a visitor, the rule is simple and safe — use vous with everyone. Staff, strangers, officials, anyone older, anyone you have just met. Nobody has ever been thought rude for being too formal in France, and using tu with a waiter or a shopkeeper is a real discourtesy rather than a charming error.

The invitation to switch is explicit when it comes: on peut se tutoyer?, or simply someone using tu with you first. Among people under about thirty, in casual settings and online, tu arrives quickly. In a shop, an office or a hotel it does not arrive at all, and that is not coldness.

But the thing that actually carries politeness in French is not the pronoun — it is Madame and Monsieur. Bonjour alone is neutral. Bonjour, Madame is courteous, and the difference between the two is larger than any grammar you could add. Attach it to everything: merci, Monsieur, au revoir, Madame, excusez-moi, Monsieur. Entering a small shop and greeting the shopkeeper by title is the whole of French good manners in three words. One update worth having: Mademoiselle was removed from official French forms in 2012 and now reads as dated or presumptuous — Madame for any adult woman.

Requests are softened by the conditional, not by piling on s'il vous plaît. Je voudrais — I would like — rather than je veux, which lands like a demand; est-ce que je pourrais… rather than je peux…. And a full apology-shaped opening, excusez-moi de vous déranger, buys a great deal of patience from a stranger you are about to ask for directions.

The accent changes at the Loire, and the pastry changes name

The old division of France is between the langue d'oïl in the north and the langue d'oc in the south — two families of speech named for how each said yes — and standard French is a descendant of the northern one, specifically the French of Paris. What is left of the southern language is an accent that anyone can hear: the Midi pronounces the silent final e that the north drops, so une petite fenêtre gains a syllable or two, and it turns the nasal vowels towards a consonant, so pain and demain end with a faint ng. It sounds warmer and slower, and Parisians will tell you so in a tone that gives away the rivalry.

The edges of the country each keep something else. Alsace has bilingual street signs and a Germanic dialect behind them. Brittany has Breton, a Celtic language whose closest relatives are Cornish and Welsh, on the road signs and in a revived school system. Corsica's language is closer to Italian than to French. The north has ch'ti, the Picard-influenced speech of the mining towns, which is affectionately incomprehensible to everyone else.

The vocabulary argument that never ends is about a pastry. What Paris calls a pain au chocolat is a chocolatine in Bordeaux, Toulouse and most of the southwest, and the disagreement is genuinely enjoyed by both sides. Elsewhere: a plastic bag is a sac or a poche depending on latitude, and the after-work drink is an apéro everywhere but takes a different form in every region.

One last regional split has real consequences for your ears, and it is across the border rather than inside it. France counts soixante-dix, quatre-vingts and quatre-vingt-dix — sixty-ten, four-twenties, four-twenty-ten. French-speaking Belgium and much of French-speaking Switzerland use septante and nonante instead, and parts of Switzerland add huitante for eighty. If you learn French numbers in one place and use them in the other, the numbers themselves are the thing that gives you away.

France, in sixty small pieces

Everything the card at the top of Start draws from — one a day, and here is the whole file. Read it on the plane.

• Every general-stream school leaver sits a four-hour philosophy essay for the baccalauréat, and the morning's questions are discussed on the news the same day.
• Bouillabaisse began as the pot Marseille fishermen made from the spiny rockfish nobody would buy, and it is still served in two goes: the broth first, the fish after.
• The Loire is the country's longest river and one of the least tamed: its bed shifts into sandbanks every summer, which is why so little cargo ever moved on it.
• Pétanque gets its name from the Provençal pès tancats, feet planted, because you must throw with both feet inside the circle and on the ground.
• Mont Blanc rises above the Chamonix valley to more than 4,800 metres, and surveyors remeasure it every couple of years because the summit is a cap of snow that shifts.
• Ratatouille takes its name from touiller, to toss or stir, and belongs to Nice, where the vegetables are traditionally cooked separately before they are allowed to meet.
• English took cul-de-sac from French, where it literally means bottom of the bag, but French drivers looking for a dead end will see signs for an impasse instead.
• Southern and northern speech were once named after their words for yes: langue d'oc and langue d'oïl. Oïl became today's oui, and Languedoc still carries the other one in its name.
• Champagne matures in crayères, chalk cellars cut beneath Reims by Roman quarrymen, where the temperature holds steady all year without any help.
• The first passengers of a hot-air balloon were a sheep, a duck and a rooster, sent up by the Montgolfier brothers in front of the court at Versailles in 1783.
• Gargoyle comes from gargouille, a throat or gurgle, because the carved beasts on a cathedral are drainpipes; a stone figure with no spout is a chimera, not a gargoyle.
• Choosing between tu and vous matters enough that both have their own verbs: you can tutoyer someone or vouvoyer them, and getting invited to the first is a small ceremony.
• The Dune du Pilat on the Atlantic coast stands over 100 metres high, taller than any other sand dune in Europe, and it creeps steadily inland over the pine forest behind it.
• Denim is a contraction of serge de Nîmes, the sturdy twill woven in that southern city, while jean comes from Gênes, the French name for Genoa.
• The metre was defined in the 1790s as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, measured along the meridian running through Paris.
• A loaf sold as pain de tradition française is made without additives or preservatives, and it cannot have been frozen at any point on its way to the counter.
• Camargue horses are born dark brown and only turn white as they mature, and they share their marshes with black bulls and a breeding colony of pink flamingos.
• Menton spends February on the Fête du Citron, building enormous sculptures out of lemons and oranges wired one by one onto steel frames.
• The Michelin guide began in 1900 as a free handbook of garages, mechanics and inns, given away by a tyre company that wanted people to drive further and wear tyres out.
• The Braderie de Lille turns the whole city into a flea market for a weekend, and its restaurants compete over who can pile the tallest heap of empty mussel shells on the pavement.
• The Eiffel Tower was put up for the 1889 world's fair with a permit to stand only twenty years, and it survived because the army found it made an excellent radio mast.
• The longest land border France has is with Brazil, not with any European country, because French Guiana sits on the South American mainland.
• Corsica is a mountain range with a coastline attached: Monte Cinto reaches 2,706 metres, and snow lies on the interior long after the beaches have warmed up.
• Dijon mustard is a recipe rather than a place: the name was never protected, so the jar in your kitchen may well have been made a very long way from Dijon.
• Cinema's first paying audience sat down in a Paris basement in December 1895 to watch short films projected by the Lumière brothers.
• The little hook under the ç is called a cédille, and its whole job is to keep the c soft before a, o and u: without it, garçon would be read as gar-kon.
• Tarte Tatin is an apple tart baked upside down, named after the Tatin sisters who served it at their hotel in Lamotte-Beuvron and turned it out onto the plate caramel side up.
• Louis Braille was blinded in a childhood accident and worked out his six-dot alphabet as a teenager at a school for blind children in Paris.
• Around Mont-Saint-Michel the tide is the largest in mainland Europe: the sea can withdraw for kilometres and then come back across the flats at a brisk walking pace.
• Vanilla became a crop because a twelve-year-old on the French island of Réunion worked out in 1841 how to pollinate the orchid by hand, and growers still use his method.
• Walking into a bakery or a small shop without saying bonjour reads as rudeness, and the greeting is normally finished off with madame or monsieur.
• Restaurant originally meant a restorative broth sold in Paris shops in the 1700s; the word migrated from the soup to the room where you drank it.
• The Compagnons du Devoir still train craftsmen the medieval way: an apprentice moves from town to town, living in a house of the trade and finishing with a masterpiece.
• Breton, spoken in the west of Brittany, is a Celtic language carried over from Britain, so it is a cousin of Welsh and Cornish rather than a relative of French.
• The mistral is a cold, dry wind that funnels down the Rhône valley and can blow for days; Provençal farmhouses are built with a blank wall facing north to take it.
• The Tour de France leader wears yellow because the paper that founded the race, L'Auto, was printed on yellow newsprint and wanted its rider spotted from the roadside.
• On the evening of 13 July, fire stations open their yards for the bal des pompiers, a public dance run by the firefighters themselves.
• Auvergne has a line of roughly eighty dormant volcanoes, the Chaîne des Puys, standing as green cones in a row across the middle of the country.
• The oldest paintings in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche are around 36,000 years old, and the horses and lions on its walls are drawn with shading and perspective.
• Locals call their own country l'Hexagone, because the mainland's coasts and borders fall roughly into a six-sided shape.
• On 2 February, Chandeleur, households make crêpes, and the custom is to flip the first one while holding a coin in your other hand to bring a prosperous year.
• The Académie française, set up in 1635 to look after the language, still keeps exactly forty members, nicknamed les immortels, who are dressed for ceremonies in the habit vert, a green embroidered coat traditionally worn with a sword.
• The 1 April joke is a paper fish, poisson d'avril, stuck on someone's back by a child who then waits for the rest of the day to notice it.
• Roquefort is ripened only in the limestone caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, where cracks in the rock keep the air cold and damp; the villagers were granted a monopoly on that ripening in 1411.
• L'esprit de l'escalier, staircase wit, is the perfect reply that arrives only once you have left the room and started down the stairs; Diderot coined the phrase.
• The stethoscope was invented in 1816 when a Paris doctor, too embarrassed to put his ear against a patient's chest, rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it.
• A restaurant must bring you tap water free of charge if you ask for une carafe d'eau, so a table can drink all evening without ordering a single bottle.
• Café prices legally differ by where you stand: an espresso taken at the counter costs less than the same cup carried out to the terrace, and both rates must be displayed.
• France has an active volcano in the Indian Ocean: Piton de la Fournaise on Réunion erupts in most years, usually as lava flows in an uninhabited crater.
• How many kisses la bise takes depends on where you are standing: two is the usual count in Paris, but parts of the country settle on three, and some on four.
• The croissant came from Vienna, which is why French bakers still file it under viennoiserie, the pastry shelf named after the Austrian capital rather than after anything French.
• Sunday is protected time rather than a shopping day: most shops stay shut, the morning market does the week's business, and lunch is allowed to run for hours.
• Dépaysement describes the pleasant disorientation of being somewhere that is not your own country, when even the door handles and the light feel unfamiliar.
• The galette des rois hides a small charm called a fève in its almond filling, and the youngest person at the table sits underneath it to call out who gets each slice.
• The Verdon gorge cuts a limestone canyon several hundred metres deep, and the river at the bottom runs a startling turquoise from the rock powder it carries.
• A circumflex usually marks a letter that fell out of the word, almost always an s, which is why hôpital, forêt and île line up with hospital, forest and isle.
• Cheese is served before dessert, not after, and there is an etiquette to cutting it: you follow the shape of the wheel, so that nobody is left holding only rind.
• Flâner means to wander a city with no destination and no hurry, purely to see what it is doing, and a person who makes a habit of it is a flâneur.
• On 21 June the Fête de la Musique fills the streets with free concerts, an idea launched in France in 1982 on the principle that anyone may play anywhere that evening.
• Counting in France goes sideways at seventy: soixante-dix is sixty-ten, quatre-vingts is four-twenties, and ninety-nine comes out as four-twenty-ten-nine.