French for travelling in France: the phrases are the easy half

You can learn twenty travel phrases in an afternoon, and they will get you about four seconds into every conversation. Then the reply arrives — at speed, with the words joined, containing something nobody put in the phrasebook — and that is where people actually freeze. The phrases are below and they are free. The rest of this page is about the reply, which is the part that needs a person.

The reply is the problem, not the phrase

Every travel phrase is a question, and a question produces an answer you did not write. You say deux baguettes, s'il vous plaît perfectly. The baker says et avec ceci ? and you have nothing — not because your French failed, but because the phrasebook only ever taught you the half you speak.

You are in good and very numerous company. France took 102 million international visitors in 2025 — a record, past 100 million for the first time the year before, and enough to keep it the most visited country in the world, with tourism receipts of €77.5 billion according to the Banque de France. Most of those people arrived with a handful of phrases and no idea what would come back at them.

This is the single most common experience travellers describe, and it has nothing to do with how many phrases they memorised. Twenty phrases and no listening practice produces someone who can open twenty conversations and finish none of them.

• “Et avec ceci ?”“And with this?” — meaning anything else? It is a closing formula, it is coming at every counter in France, and freezing on it is most people's first real French failure.
• “Ce sera tout ?”“Will that be all?” The same question again. Yes is ce sera tout, merci.
• “Vous avez la monnaie ?”Do you have change — asked constantly, and it catches people because monnaie looks like “money” and means coins.
• “C'est pour emporter ?”Takeaway or eating in. Answer sur place or à emporter.

None of those four is difficult. All four are invisible until someone says them to you, and none of them appears in a list of phrases to say.

The phrases, since you came for them

These are the twenty that actually earn their place — the ones you will use on a single trip rather than the ones that fill out a list. Learn the pronunciation rather than the spelling: being understood is entirely a matter of sound.

Ten, not twenty, because the other ten are variations of these. An AI can hand you a hundred and it will not change the outcome — the constraint was never the size of the list.

The one that matters more than the other nine

Say bonjour first, every time, before anything else. Not as politeness — as a required opening move. In France a shop is somebody's space and you greet the person in it before you ask for anything. Skipping it is read as rudeness, and it is the most common reason travellers conclude that French people are cold.

It costs one word and it changes the entire tone of what follows. A visitor with terrible French who says bonjour is treated better than a fluent one who does not.

What thirty minutes before you travel actually buys

Not more phrases — the replies to the ones you already have. One short lesson spent on what comes back at you is worth more than weeks of memorising, because the list was never the missing piece.

What that adds up to has a name. A1, the first level on the Council of Europe's Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, is defined as being able to handle simple, concrete exchanges and to understand the answer when the other person is willing to slow down and help. That is the whole holiday, described exactly, and it is the lowest of six levels rather than some distant achievement. Nobody is selling you fluency before a trip — but A1 is real, it has a definition somebody else wrote, and it is reachable in a few lessons.

1. We run the counter exchangeBoth halves. I say the thing the baker says, at the speed the baker says it, until it stops being a surprise.
2. You get the four soundsThe ones English does not have. Tu versus tout matters more than any amount of vocabulary.
3. You practise not understandingThe most useful skill of the trip: asking for slower, gracefully, without the conversation collapsing.

Questions travellers ask

See also: starting from absolute zero if the trip is the beginning rather than the whole plan · why the reply sounds so fast · a teacher who is actually here.