Les jours de la semaine

Diamond Doyle; Lisa A Luengo; Nick Taylor

Chapitre Deux

Les jours de la semaine

Exercice 2.27 - 2.28

Les jours de la semaine

The French calendar works a bit differently than the American calendar, and this is very important when it comes to travel, schedules, and even birthdays. The French calendar starts on Monday, so the first day of the week on a calendar is lundi and the last day on the calendar is Sunday, dimanche. Notice that days of the week and months of the year are not capitalized in French.

One thing that is hard for English speakers in French is differentiating when to use the singular versus the plural with days.

To say “on” a day of the coming week, leave it as a stand alone and use the singular form: Lundi, je vais chez le médecin. This translates as “On Monday, I am going to the doctor’s.”
For a recurring event, you can either use the singular form and include le before the day of the week or use the plural and say tous les along with the day of the week in the plural form. J’ai le cours d’algèbre le mardi et le jeudi. / J’ai le cours d’algèbre tous les mardis et tous les jeudis. Both of these sentences translate as “I have algebra on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Another key difference is how dates are written out in French. Whereas in American English we will use the format month/day/year, in French we use day/month/year. That means that April 10th, 2025 would be written as 10/04/2025 in the French formatting. We will learn more about dates a bit later on in this chapter.