Un Coup - one word hundreds of sentences you can say

Each month at The French Room we focus on one word and explore how far we can use it across different situations and to express different meanings without changing the base phrase.

This month (April 2026) our word is UN COUP.

Incredibly it's the most frequently used noun in the French language. 

This short podcast gives you a feel for how you can use it. If you want to know more about how to do this with one French word at a time visit thefrenchroom.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Salut bonjour, bienvenue à ce tuto, ce rendez-vous tuto pour le mois d'avril 2026 où on va parler du mot du mois pour le French room un coup. Hi there, welcome to this rendezvous tutor for April 2026 where we're talking about our word of the month which is uncou. And when I say word of a month, that's every month at the French room we look at one word and we work just with that one word and find out all the different things we can do with that in lots of different ways in hundreds of different sentences so that you can speak in a really fluent and natural way. And uncou is our word this month, it's a noun, and it's actually the most frequently used noun in the French language, which may or may not be a surprise to you. So what are we going to do with it? The first thing we're going to do with it is say some phrases out loud, and then we'll have a look at actually how do we get to those phrases, and you can see a little bit about how a single word gets to have a central focus in the French room across the month. So I'm going to say these three three phrases for you out loud. Je put te passe un coup de fil je te donne un coup de main. Du coup je change d'avis. Now there are three phrases, three phrases out of many many phrases that we could make with this single word uncoup. First one is comes from let's just see where it comes from. It comes from passer un coup de fil. Passe un coup de fil is to make a phone call. So I can extend that and play with that to play it to really make a sentence that I'm likely to say. So je peux passer un coup de fil. Notice that my intonation goes up slightly because it is a question, and that means can I ring you? Basically. The next one is donner un coup de main, which is to give a hand. I'm going to put that into a phrase and I'm going to drop a little t in there as well. So je te donne un coup de main. Actually, that's a question. So let's not let's not make that a question because there's no question mark. Did you notice that in the intonation? I'm going to make it nice and flat now with a slight fall at the end here. Je te donne un coup de main. Yeah, je te don un coup de main, which is I'll give you a hand. And then the last one, du coup. Now du coup is a bit of a sort of like a gushing moment, a so, and therefore, you know, it's a kind of like an in-betweeney phrase that gets used an awful lot as a filler and a joiner in French, which I guess you'll be very interested in because those are the ones that make you sound most fluent. So du coup j'ai changé d'avis. And this one, so in the end, I changed my mind. So you can see it's the same word, uncou, but we're getting new meanings in each of the different phrases. What I'd like you to do with it is give it a try. Try it. So pick one of those phrases. You'll see them written down underneath this video if you're on the website. Write it down. That's really important. Write it down on a piece of paper. The physical act of writing it down makes you own it a little bit more, makes you slow down and see how it works, makes it more yours. Then say it, say it out loud, and then like I did, you could make you could change uh one element in it, keep it on that piece of paper, working it through, and just see how you can play with it and make new phrases, new tenses, new ways of saying, each of each time reusing the same elements though of encounter. And if you do that, what are you actually doing? You're using real French straight away. There we are, we've done it immediately, and you're reusing the same words, and they're becoming more familiar to you every single time you write them down and say them out loud. What's your next step after this tutor? Record yourself 30 to 60 seconds, it doesn't have to be perfect. Have a couple of tries if you want to record yourself and then send it to me for feedback, and I'll give you back something precise and usable to make your French sound more French. Merci beaucoup, merci beaucoup, à bientôt. Au revoir.