Free Exam Tips: One or Many (singular vs plural)

In our last blog post Free Download: Getting up close and personal (present), we continued to explain the idea that preparing for a DELF, DALF, or TCF French oral comprehension and speaking exam can be approached in a common way. French oral exam evaluators can ask questions using the present verb tense and the questions will often be direct. We learned in the previous post that this line of questioning can use vous or votre as an indicator.

French Oral Exam Question Type 2

In this post, we will examine our second question category in our list of seven that we call “One or Many (singular vs plural). During your DALF or DELF French oral exam you may be presented with questions that will test your ability to distinguish between a question that is asking you to respond with a single answer or several answers. Similar to our last blog post Free Download: Getting up close and personal (present), this type of question is assessing your French oral comprehension skills, therefore, it is important that you practice listening to French speakers describe items that are singular and plural in order to improve your oral comprehension and notice the common indicators. To illustrate this point, during your self-study period you may have already used questions with keywords expecting a singular response, such as: primordial, essentiel, principale, priortaire. Your natural response to this line of questioning would have created a distinction between a singular response versus its plural form:

ma tâche contre mes tâches
Ma responsabilité principale contre mes responsabilités
est contre sont
votre contre vos

French Oral Exam Question Examples

Some possible questions that your French oral exam evaluator may ask you for this question category are:

Quel est votre objectif pour l’avenir ? (Singulier)
Quels sont vos objectifs pour l’avenir ? (Plural)
Quel est la tâche la plus importante au travail? (Singulier)
Quelles sont vos trois tâches/responsabilités principales ? (Plural)
Quels sont les obstacles que vous rencontrez à votre poste? (Plural)

Practice responding to each of these questions and paste the text into an online translator that has the ability to read the text so that you can also practice listening to the sentences being spoken out loud.

French Oral Exam Question Type Singular and Plural

Download French Oral Exam Question Type Singular vs Plural

Personal Learning Plan Activities

As part of your personal study plan, create ten more singular sentences and ten more plural sentences. What changes did you make to the nouns? Did you make any changes to the pronouns? What about the spelling for masculine and feminine? Did their endings have to change?

Within this blog post series we will also help you to not only identify plural and singular questions, but also to provide the evaluator a response that demonstrates your comprehension of the question. This blog post is a summary from Phase 3: Le Conseil in our DELF, DALF, TCF, TEF French Oral Exam Study Series.

Our French Oral Exam Question blog post series focuses on seven common categories of French evaluation questions that can aid anyone preparing for a DELF, DALF, TCF exam or even a job interview conducted in French.

French Oral Exam Learning Plan

Don’t forget to track your progress and update your Personal Learning Plan. You can pre-order your copy of our French Oral Exam Learning Plan to help you reuse our template and recommended approach to incrementally build upon your foundational knowledge.

Take control of your learning strategy and be ready for your DELF, DALF, or TCF French oral evaluation.