With practice, it becomes easy to identify French parts of speech.
To the untrained ear, French can be a difficult language to comprehend. The prevalence of unpronounced and nasalized consonants, and the large number of homonyms, force many non-native speakers to use context clues to understand the French words they hear. While pronunciation can be confusing, many aspects of the French language are fairly straightforward. There are, for example, a few simple tricks to understanding the difference between nouns and verbs in the French language.
Instructions
1. Determine if the word in question is proceeded by an article or a pronoun. While there are exceptions, typically a verb is preceded by a noun or one of the following pronouns: je, tu, elle, il, nous, vous, elles or ils. A noun will often be preceded by a definite article such as le, la or les; an indefinite article such as un, une or des; or a possessive pronoun such as mon, ma, ton, ta, nôtre or vôtre.
2. Learn conjugate verbs, and then listen or look for conjugation. If a word is conjugated, it is a verb.
3. Use context clues in conjunction with the previous methods to determine which part of speech a particular French word belongs to. If a word is preceded and followed by nouns, it may be a verb connecting a subject to an object. If the word is at the beginning of a sentence, it may well be a noun, pronoun or article. If the word is at the beginning of a question, it may be a verb.
