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Lesson Transcript

Salut, je m'appelle Ingrid. Hi everybody! I’m Ingrid.
Welcome to FrenchPod101.com’s “Le français en 3 minutes”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn French.
In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to deal with the verb to be in French, être.
We will also discuss how to talk about your nationality.
When you meet a new person in France, they might ask you Vous êtes de quelle nationalité? which is the equivalent of "Where do you come from?"
You’re familiar with vous, the formal word for "you."
êtes is a conjugated form of the “to be” verb être.
De quelle means "Of what?"
Nationalité is "Nationality"
All together it's De quelle nationalité êtes-vous?
[slowly] De quelle nationalité êtes-vous?
Answering this question is very easy! You just say Je suis, which means "I am", then your nationality.
For example: Je suis américain
[slowly] Je suis américain.
Just replace “américain” with your own nationality.
"I am German" is Je suis allemand.
"I am Italian" is Je suis italien .
"I am Brazilian" is Je suis brésilien.
Be careful, because this is how you refer to your nationality if you are male. For the feminine form, you have to add an e at the end of the nationality.
For example, if you are an American woman, you will say: Je suis américaine
German women say:
Je suis allemande
For Brazilian women it is:
Je suis brésilienne,
and so on.
To return the question you can simply say Et vous? which is "And you?" in a polite way.
Now it’s time for Ingrid’s tips.
Be careful because in French, we don’t write nationality names with a capital letter like in English!
But there is an exception—we do so when we talk about an entire population living in one country. For example we put a capital letter when writing les Français, which means French people in general.
In this lesson we learned how to talk about nationalities.
Next time we’ll continue to study the verb être and we'll see how to use it to talk about locations. By the way, do you know how to ask someone where they are in French? I'll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Le français en 3 minutes.
A bientôt!

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