Chapter 30 is a reality check – French Lesson Downsizing Workplace. It’s a scary subject that you may have to deal with in your career as a manager.
Being able to talk about investors and downsizing will help a lot read up.
- “a downsizing”: « une réduction d’effectifs »
Example sentence
“The investors were asking HR to begin downsizing.”
« Les investisseurs demandaient aux RH de commencer la réduction d’effectifs. »
Breakdown
- “the investors”: « les investisseurs »
- “were asking”: « demandaient »
So, this is « demandaient », “to ask” in the « imparfait ». We’ll see how it works in the grammar point.
- “HR”: « les RH »
So, HR stands for human resources. Les RH, les ressources humaines. It’s just inverted because the English has the noun “human” as the adjective by placing it before. But in French you need the adjective after the noun. So « les ressources humaines », be careful with the S-link. Despite the « h », the link still needs to be made.
Quick tip: “HRD”
To translate acronyms, what you usually do is you simply invert the letters. For example, HRD, the human resources department is going to be « la DRH », « la direction des ressources humaines ». « Le DRH » is the person, the Director of human resources. « La DRH » is either the female Director or the department.
Grammar point: l’imparfait (continuous part)
Uses of l’imparfait: it’s a continuous past. Unlike the « passé composé » which is a completed action, a brief event. The imparfait is used to describe ongoing past actions or a past event with a certain duration, a background event or a repeated past event. You use it when you can’t use the passé compose, because it’s not a brief event.
For instance, “I was running” (« je courais ») is a continuous past (imparfait in French) vs “I ran” (« j’ai couru ») which is a simple past (passé compose in French).
How does it work? You basically need an extra “i” in the middle. For example, let’s conjugate « DEMANDER ».
« DEMANDER », first group verb. So, we have the ending “-ER”. Remove it and you have the root « demand- ». And you add the endings for « imparfait ».
DEMANDER – TO ASK (imparfait)
| Je demand-ais | I asked |
| Tu demand-ais | You asked |
| Il/Elle demand-ait | He/She asked |
| Nous demand-ions | We asked |
| Vous demand-iez | You asked |
| Ils/Elles demand-aient | They asked |
If you noticed how it’s spelled, there is always an “i”. The “i” is the mark of « imparfait ».
Quick tip 2: imparfait vs future/conditional
The way to avoiding mixing up « imparfait » with future is to remember this: if there is an “r”, it’s probably future or conditional. If there is an “i”, it’s probably « imparfait ». Don’t mix them up!
« L’imparfait » is going to be « il demandait », the future is going to be « il demandera ». The conditional would be « il demanderait ».
French Lesson Downsizing Workplace is a helpful way of talking about a difficult subejct , especially when your are still learning Business french. Here are some other difficult subjects to tackle.
Then again, at the Institu, we love reading about the various events in French to improve our confidence with French Vocabulary – you can take a look here
