Most "never say this in French" lists are exaggerated. The real mistakes English speakers make are a small set of translation traps, register habits, and grammar tells, and each one has a simple replacement. Here is what to actually say instead, with examples, from a learner who has made most of them.
- ✓Most "never say" lists are exaggerated. The phrases they warn about are usually fine when the register is right. The real errors are a smaller set.
- ✓The four failure modes are translation traps, register and etiquette, overused crutches, and grammar tells. Each one has a natural replacement.
- ✓The replacement is almost always shorter and simpler than the mistake, and the French person will simply understand you and move on.
- ✓You cannot hear your own tells while you are producing them, which is why the same habits survive for months. Feedback on your actual output is the fix.
- ✓This list comes from a learner's own documented slips, not a teacher's idealized version. I have made most of them myself.
Short answer: most "what not to say in French" lists are wrong in the other direction. The phrases they warn about are mostly fine when the register is right. The real mistakes are a small set of translation traps, register habits, and grammar tells, and each one has a simple thing to say instead. Say the thing. Say it the way a real person does.
A quick note on who is writing this. I am building Coucou, an AI French tutor, and I am also the learner. My wife is French, which means my French gets tested at the family table, and I have the honest scars to show for it, including one lunch where I understood about one word in ten and smiled anyway. I gave myself a personal goal of roughly B2 by the end of 2026. Right now, around Day 93, my roadmap says B1 with 66 of 66 milestones functional, and the honest gaps are still visible: I am working si-clause hypotheticals and conditional production, with the conditional endings still emerging. I still slip on gender agreement when I am speaking fast. I am not fluent. I have made most of the mistakes below myself, which is exactly why I am the right person to list them.
Most "never say" lists are exaggerated
The negative-space genre sells fear. "Never say this in French" sounds urgent, so the lists keep growing, and most of them are overcautious. Take je veux. Half the articles on French politeness will tell you to never say it. Natives say it constantly, in the right context and the right tone. The phrase itself is fine. The problem is using it where a softer form belongs.
So this list is a set of swaps. For each trap there is one natural thing to say instead, and the swap is almost always shorter than the mistake. What you are really learning is which of your English habits do not survive translation.
Translation traps: the false friends
A false friend is a French word that looks like an English one and means something else. These cost the most because you say them with total confidence and have no idea what you just said.
The ones that get the loudest reactions are the ones with the biggest gap between what you mean and what lands. Je suis excité does not mean you are looking forward to something. It means you are aroused or wound up, so j'ai hâte de is the safe default: j'ai hâte de partir. Préservatif is the word for condom, so if you mean the stuff that keeps food fresh, the word is conservateur. And if you are ever tempted to translate "bless you" word for word after a sneeze, stop. The French say à tes souhaits, and blesser means to wound.
Two happy surprises balance the list. Formidable is positive in French, so le spectacle était formidable means the show was wonderful and you can use it freely. And bras means arm, not the garment. The garment is un soutien-gorge, which you will only need to know if you say the wrong word in a shop.
The way to actually learn false friends is to group them by the English word that triggers them, so "actually" routes to en fait, "to attend" routes to assister à, and "to demand" routes to exiger. One trigger word, one French answer. That is faster than studying a glossary, and it matches how your brain retrieves the mistake in the first place.
Register and etiquette: where the tone lives
The register mistakes do not change the meaning. They change how you land, and these are the ones that make a polite person wince.
tu and vous with your partner's parents. Start with vous and do not switch yourself. In France the older person, or the person you have just met, usually offers the switch, with the line on peut se tutoyer. Using tu too early with someone's parents reads as pushy, and you do not want your first impression at the family table to be pushy. Vous used too long is rarely rude, just a little formal. This is the exact situation the guide to learning French for your partner's family covers, and it is where I have personally used vous for the longest stretches of my life.
"garçon!" is not how you get a waiter. It is outdated, and it reads as ordering a servant around. The natural move is eye contact plus s'il vous plaît, or excusez-moi, madame or monsieur. In a café, s'il vous plaît alone, said with a nod, is enough.
"je veux" at a counter. Natives do say je veux, but when you are asking for something, the soft forms are the default: je voudrais un café, or the very common je vais prendre un café. The politeness comes from choosing the soft form rather than from adding words.
Where s'il vous plaît goes. The default is after the request: un café, s'il vous plaît. Leading with it, s'il vous plaît, un café, can read as pleading or emphasis. It is understandable either way, but the after position is what a native expects.
Say bonjour before anything else. In France the greeting is the entry ticket. Walk into a shop and the first word out of your mouth should be bonjour, before you ask for anything. Skipping it reads as rude in a way that no amount of politeness later fixes. It is the cheapest social win in the language.
"mademoiselle" is disappearing. Official French forms dropped it in 2012, and madame is the safe default for any adult woman. Some older speakers still use it, but madame is the safe default.
Overused crutches: the textbook tells
These phrases mark you as a learner even when your French is correct. Nothing is wrong with them. They are just not what people say.
"très" everywhere. English leans on "very" and the habit transfers. French has better tools: super is everywhere in casual speech, and the precise word beats the intensifier. C'est très bon becomes c'est délicieux. Il est très gentil becomes il est adorable. Save très for when you mean it.
"comme ci comme ça". Most textbooks teach it as the answer to ça va, and you will almost never hear a native use it. Real answers run from ça va to bof to moyen to pas terrible. Saying comme ci comme ça is a museum piece, and natives will smile at it.
"mon ami" to strangers. In France, un ami is a real friend, not an acquaintance, and the word is used sparingly. Calling a stranger mon ami claims a relationship that is not there. You do not need a filler for "my friend" in French. Just say the sentence.
"je suis ok" for agreement. Natives type ok in chat all the time, so this is a soft tell, but je suis d'accord is the native default for agreeing and it works in every register. If you are agreeing to a plan, d'accord alone does the job.
Grammar tells: the ones that survive longest
These habits persist even at intermediate level, because they are structural and nobody corrects them in conversation.
Gender slips on common nouns. English has no gender, so your brain does not track it, and it is the last thing to stabilize. My own documented tell was semaine dernier instead of la semaine dernière, which I said for weeks before anyone pointed it out. The fix is mechanical: learn every noun with its article from day one, la semaine, une photo, le problème, and the slip rate drops fast. The pronunciation side of the same problem is in the guide to the French sounds English speakers get wrong.
Age and physical states take avoir. J'ai 30 ans, not je suis 30 ans. J'ai froid, j'ai faim, j'ai soif, not the être versions. This is a classic translation trap and it never stops being worth checking, because "I am cold" comes out as je suis froid, which means something else entirely.
The polite defaults are a habit, not a rule. Register is context. With friends you can say je veux and ok and tu all day. The defaults above are for the situations where you do not know the person, which for most learners is most of the time. Learn the soft versions first and the casual ones will follow on their own.
Why these habits survive
Every mistake in this list is the kind you cannot hear yourself make. When you are producing French, your brain is busy building the sentence, so it does not audit the gender, the register, or the false friend. That is why the same tells survive for months. Recording yourself catches some of them, which is how I caught the eu sound in veux after saying it flat for about two weeks. The rest need an outside ear.
That outside check is the honest seam where the tool I am building fits. Coucou, the AI French tutor I am building, scores your pronunciation per word, names the word that was off, and sends native model audio back. It texts you when it is time to practice, so the check happens daily, and it spaces out your mistakes so the same tell resurfaces until you fix it. The honest limits are real. A few tools now score pronunciation, mostly on drilled or copied lines, Copycat on copied phrases and Conversaflex on phoneme drills, so Coucou is not the only scorer in the field. Its scoring is good but not flawless, it can misread fast or noisy audio, and it is not a replacement for a human ear. It is free while early access lasts, and I approve new people by hand, usually within a few hours. The bigger point is the mechanic, not any single tool: the habits in this list are exactly the ones a scored check surfaces, because they are the ones you cannot hear in yourself.
If your block is the freeze rather than the mistakes, the guide to overcoming the fear of speaking French covers the emotional side. If the sounds themselves are the problem, the French R guide is the deepest single-sound page on this site. And if you understand French but still cannot speak it, the flagship article on that exact problem is where the whole story starts.
The short version of this list is one sentence: learn the swaps, use the soft forms, and get something to check your output. Everything else is practice.
Last updated: 12 August 2026. This is a personal account from someone still learning, not expert linguistic advice. Register and usage shift with context, so treat the examples as defaults, not laws.
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