Picture this: You’re video chatting with your sweetheart, who is on another continent miles away. You want to impress them with how much your French has improved since you last spoke, so when you get the chance you say ‘Je te manque’. Your sweetheart can’t help laughing, and that’s when you realise you’ve made a mistake.

Contrary to English, there is a reversal which occurs when expressing the idea of missing someone or something emotionally in French. In order to understand this reversal, it is necessary to differentiate between the entity being missed (henceforth known as the object) and the entity doing the missing so to speak (henceforth known as the subject). In English, the order would be Subject misses object. In French, the order would be something along the lines of Object is missed by subject. The expression used to convey ‘to miss someone’ in French is ‘manquer à quelqu’un’. So, where do the subject and object fit around this expression? The object comes before manquer and the subject is placed after à.

Let’s have a look at an example:

In the sentence Katie misses her dad, ‘Katie’ is the subject (entity doing the missing) and ‘dad’ is the object (entity being missed). In French, we would say: Son père manque à Katie. Notice how the object and subject have traded places while still maintaining the meaning of Katie misses her dad. It may help to think of it as Her [Katie’s] dad is missed by her. If you keep this format in mind when translating from English to French, you will more readily be able to determine whether or not your translation is accurate (and tell people how you feel without confusing them!).

Let’s look at the alternative: Katie manque à son père. This implies that Katie’s dad is the one who misses her, instead of the other way around (of course this could very well be the case, but one does not necessarily imply the other).

The verb ‘manquer’ is conjugated according to the object (entity being missed). For example, ‘I miss you’ would be translated as ‘Vous me manquez’. Notice how manquez takes the ending of ‘vous’ (second person plural) and not ‘me’ (first person singular). You may be wondering why the ‘à’ has disappeared all of a sudden in this example. This is because ‘me’ is an indirect object pronoun, which means it takes the place of ‘à + object’.

Not sure what indirect object pronouns are? Stay tuned for the next post!