Good day hivers, #community builders and my fellow education lovers, welcome to another French lesson! 🇫🇷. Gradually and gradually we are becoming acquainted with the language and specialist in speaking, just stay with me as we take it one at a time.
Today I want us to learn a very useful French expression that you can use in normal conversations, in situations where you want to give your opinion about something or make your views or point known.
The expression is “À mon avis”, which means In my opinion or in my view. It sounds very basic yeah? So let’s get into it.
This particular one is one of those expressions that may look very simple like I just said but it is actually very useful because we give opinions almost every day being alive.
You can use it when talking about school, work, relationships, movies, music, food, football, politics, fashion, travelling or even something as simple as deciding where to eat 😂, just anything ! So how important can an expression be?
Anytime you want to make it clear that what you are saying is your personal opinion and not necessarily an established fact, this expression can come in handy and it doesn’t sound lame at all because French native speakers understand the essence and use it a lot.
For example, you can say “À mon avis, ce film est très intéressant.”
That means “In my opinion, this movie is very interesting.”
You can also say “À mon avis, il faut travailler plus.” which means “In my opinion, we need to work harder.”
Another simple example is “À mon avis, apprendre une langue étrangère est très important.” which means “In my opinion, learning a foreign language is very important.”
When we use this expression it makes conversation sweeter and real because someone else can disagree with you and say “À mon avis, le film est excellent.” And that is completely normal because we are talking about opinions.
You can also use it in a conversation when someone asks you directly what you think. Imagine your friend asks you, “Tu penses quoi de cette chanson ?” meaning “What do you think about this song?” You can respond, “À mon avis, elle est très belle.”= In my opinion, it is very beautiful, or maybe someone asks you about learning French and you say, “À mon avis, le français est une langue magnifique, mais il faut beaucoup pratiquer.” = In my opinion, French is a beautiful language, but you need to practise a lot.
Another interesting thing about learning expressions like this is that you start moving away from translating every single word in your head because translating French could be very crazy 😝 if we translate some expressions word by word we will go out of meaning and context.
For example hen you see “à mon avis”, you should gradually begin to recognise the whole expression as one useful conversational unit instead of taking it one by one like: a, mon , a, vis.
Literally, “à” can mean “at/to,” “mon” means “my,” and “avis” means “opinion.” So the literal idea is something like “at my opinion,” but French naturally uses “à mon avis” to express in my opinion and that is why learning complete expressions can sometimes be more useful than memorising individual words without knowing how they naturally work together.
There are also different ways to express opinions in French. “À mon avis” is one of the easiest ones to remember, but you will also hear “Selon moi”, which can mean “according to me” or “in my opinion,” and “Je pense que…”, meaning “I think that…” For example, “Je pense que cette idée est intéressante.” means “I think this idea is interesting.” but if you want a simple expression that you can quickly place at the beginning of a sentence, “À mon avis” is a very good one to have in your vocabulary.
I hope we have been able to add this to our vocabulary structure and French bank 😝 but tho it’s not always about adding and learning but usage matters a lot.
Thank you for reading
SAINT HEROD