Unit 1 - The personal world: identity, family and routine
What Unit 1 asks of you
Unit 1 builds the personal language you will reuse all year: introducing yourself, describing family and friends, school routine, hobbies and daily life. The grammar spine is the present tense. You must control regular -er, -ir and -re verbs, the four key irregulars aller, avoir, être and faire, and reflexive verbs such as se lever, se coucher and s'habiller. Reflexive verbs appear in almost every routine question, so learn the pronoun order: je me, tu te, il/elle/on se, nous nous, vous vous, ils/elles se.
Concepts and traps
Adjective agreement is the most common mark-loser: grand/grande/grands/grandes, plus irregular forms such as beau/belle, vieux/vieil and nouveau/nouvel. Possessive adjectives agree with the noun, not the owner (son père, sa mère). Articles change under negation: Je mange du pain becomes Je ne mange pas de pain. Questions can be formed three ways - intonation, est-ce que and inversion - and the register differs; use est-ce que in speech and inversion in formal writing. Watch tu/vous: examiners notice a sudden switch. Listening traps include liaison (les amis sounds like les-z-amis) and numbers (soixante-dix, quatre-vingt-un). False friends: actuellement means currently, not actually; éventuellement means possibly.
Worked example
Prompt: describe your morning routine in the present tense, then negate one action.
Model: Je me lève à sept heures, je me lave et je m'habille. Je ne prends pas de petit-déjeuner.
Rule of thumb: the reflexive pronoun must match the subject, and the partitive article becomes de after a negative. Check every verb against its subject before moving on.