Ten French Valentine Tips

In this cool Valentine’s Day cartoon, Aurélie Drouard gets down to basics to help you avoid a catastrophe on le jour de la Saint-Valentin and along the way pick up some cool, useful (and funny) French expressions – at least one of which you won’t find in a text book!

Watch the video first and see how much you can understand. Then you can click the phrases beneath to see translations and links to useful related grammar.

Dix choses à faire – et ne pas faire – le jour de la Saint-Valentin…

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 1

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 2

Le McDo, c'est bien pour les dimanches soirs paresseux, pas pour le jour de l'Amoooouuuur !
= McDonald's, it's good for lazy Sunday evenings, not for the day of Luuuurve!Related lessons:
Describing things in French with c'est = it is

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 3

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 4

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 5

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 6

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 7

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 8

Pose ce téléphone !
Se faire les yeux doux par écran interposé, si ça marchait, ça se saurait !
= Put down that phone!
Making doe eyes with a screen in-between, if that worked, we would know!
Related lessons:
Using the infinitive form of verbs to express the English "-ING"

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 9

French Valentine’s Day Tip # 10

Author info

Aurélie Drouard

Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since.  She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!

Gruff Davies

[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.

Comments: 4

Bonjour Madame Aurélie !
Thanks for posting this content but I am still a school- going student so am mainly focussed on the grammatical aspects !
Here you quote a sentence - Personne ne veut embrasser quelqu’un qui a mauvaise haleine .
Here why we can’t write ‘qui a de mauvaise haleine’ as it is a negative sentence where “une” can be replaced with “de”. Or simply the other way round- quelqu’un avec de mauvaise haleine .
Which of the two would be correct ? Thanks again for devoting time to respond .
Bonne journée !

Bonjour Shrey !

Here it's a question of terminology :)
A negative sentence doesn't mean a sentence with a negative meaning, but a sentence containing a negative structure, in French "ne...pas", "ne... jamais", "ne...plus" etc
So here the sentence, though meaning something bad, is not a negative sentence, hence using "une" ;)

I hope that's helpful!
Bonne journée !

The tenth tip was missed out and replaced with the outro. So please could you transate the 'ne romps pas' part :)

Bonjour Zsazsa, et merci beaucoup !

Thanks to you, the article has now been fixed, and the missing tenth tip added :)

Merci encore et bonne journée !