Asking can i in french

On the other hand, when you expect the answer to be no , you can have two options:. To respond to the above, see Answering questions. When you ask for information about who, what, when, etc. This free website is created with love and a great deal of work. If you love it, please consider making a one-time or monthly donation. You must log in to post a comment. I am super grateful for your work and thank you so much for this. Lawless French » Grammar Lessons. Les questions Knowing how to ask questions is essential for making plans, shopping, traveling, getting to know people, and any other activity that requires obtaining information.

Par exemple… Est-ce que vous aimez voyager? Do you like traveling? Is he ready? Have they eaten? Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.

Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. By ThoughtCo Team. Updated January 27, Aren't you going to the movies? Est-ce que tu veux venir? You don't want to come? Instead, on would be used, and so the usual way to say "we can come" in spoken French would be on peut venir. The vous form, used to say "you can" when talking to several people or when addressing one person formally, would be vous pouvez.

To to say "you can come in" , using the verb entrer , this would be vous pouvez entrer this same sentence could also mean "you can go in" -- the French verb entrer covers both senses. To say "they can" in French, you need to choose between elles the feminine form, used to refer to a group of people who are all female and ils the masculine form, used to refer to an all-male group or a mixture of male and female.

In either case, the actual verb form is peuvent. For example, "they can come" would be either ils peuvent venir or elles peuvent venir. If the subject of the sentence is the name of an actual thing or person i. For example, to say "David can help" , this would be David peut aider ; to say "the computer can help" , this would be l'ordinateur peut aider ; to say "my parents can come" , this time using the plural form of the verb to indicate more than one parent, this would be mes parents peuvent venir.

The French verb pouvoir can be used in a similar way. To do so, we use one of the forms mentioned in the previous section. But we need to make it into a question. So for example, to say "Can you? Forms with est-ce que are also possible, so that "Can you help me? For more details, see the section on how to ask a question in French.

The French equivalent to "Can I? In a similar way to English, this can be used to make a request or to make a suggestion or offer. For example:. For more information about why the word vous comes before aider in the first of these examples, see the section on pronouns.

Note that before a verb beginning with a vowel, puis-je is still written with the final -e , even though it would not actually be pronounced in that case. As mentioned, French usually expresses "can" in the sense of "have the know-how to" in a slightly different way.