About

Why it exists

I built Italian Unpacked while learning Italian as an adult, and I made this French version for a family member who is learning French. French often builds a sentence differently from English: the object pronoun comes before the verb, negation goes around the verb with ne … pas, and with manquer the person you miss is the subject. Many English speakers were never taught the parts of speech well enough to say what changed, so the site names them and defines them as it goes.

French Unpacked is the sister site of Italian Unpacked, which compares English and Italian the same way.

Structure, not translation

Each sentence pair is shown in three pictures.

Word order. The English words are on top and the French words are below. Each word is labelled with its part of speech. A line joins each English word to the French word that matches it. A dashed box marks a word with no match in the other language. In a command, a word in parentheses marks the subject, which is not said. This picture shows which words moved.

The English diagram. It shows how the English sentence is built. Each part of the sentence is labelled: subject, verb, object, and so on. Words that modify another word hang below it.

The French diagram. It shows the same things for the French sentence.

Each part of speech has its own colour, and the colour is the same in all three pictures. Hover over a word, or tap it, to highlight that word and its match in all three.

Compare the two diagrams to see what changed. Two matched words can do different jobs. In “I miss you”, you is the object. In “Tu me manques”, tu is the subject and me is the indirect object. The word-order picture joins you to tu. Only the diagrams show that its job changed.

Who it is for

The site is written for learners at about A2 to B1. If you find a mistake, use the feedback form or email feedback@frenchunpacked.com.

Start with the side-by-side diagrams. If the grammar terms are unfamiliar, start with Parts of speech.