Guide
Tu or vous, and the mistakes that sound rude
Nearly every learner is told that vous is formal and tu is familiar, and left there. The real difficulty is not the choice — it is that French politeness lives in verb forms and turns of phrase, so a perfectly correct sentence can land as an order.
In short
- When in doubt, use vous. Being too formal is invisible; being too familiar is not.
- The switch to tu is proposed, usually by the older person or the one in charge. You do not take it, you accept it.
- Politeness is carried by the conditional and by question form, far more than by the word please.
- Three habits sound abrupt to French ears, and all three come from translating directly.
Choosing, in practice
The workable rule is short: vous with anyone you do not know, anyone older, anyone serving you or being served by you, and everyone at work until told otherwise. Tu with children, with friends, and with colleagues who have proposed it.
The asymmetry matters: too formal costs you nothing, too familiar can cost you the conversation. A foreigner who uses vous with everyone is simply polite. A foreigner who uses tu with a shopkeeper has made a real mistake, even if nobody says so.
Switching is proposed, not taken. The offer usually comes from the older person or the one with authority, often as an explicit sentence. Until it comes, stay with vous — including with people who use tu with you, which happens and does not oblige you.
Politeness is in the structure, not in the word
This is the part almost nobody explains. In French, the polite version of a request is not the same sentence plus s'il vous plaît — it is a different structure. The conditional turns a demand into a request, and asking a question softens it further. « I want » becomes « I would like »; « give me » becomes « could you give me ».
Adding s'il vous plaît to a bare imperative does not fix it. « Give me the bill, please » is grammatically fine and still lands as an instruction. This is the single most useful thing to correct early, because it costs nothing to learn and it changes how you are received in every shop, office and restaurant.
The three habits that sound abrupt
- Not greeting first. In France you say hello before you say anything else — entering a shop, calling a service, stopping someone in the street. Going straight to the request is the most common and most costly mistake a foreigner makes, and it is read as rudeness rather than as a language error.
- Using the bare imperative. See above: the conditional exists for this.
- Ending an e-mail like an English one. A one-word sign-off reads as curt in a language that closes with a full sentence.
What Russian and English speakers each get wrong
Russian speakers have the tu/vous distinction already and transfer it almost perfectly. Their difficulty is elsewhere: Russian carries politeness with fewer softening words, and a direct translation of a perfectly courteous Russian request can arrive in French as blunt.
English speakers have the opposite problem. English has no tu/vous, so the choice feels arbitrary and they default to whichever they heard last. They also under-use the conditional, because English politeness rides mostly on please and on intonation — neither of which does the job in French.
Codes are loosening, unevenly
Younger people, start-ups and some regions use tu far more readily than the rule above suggests, and an administration or a bank will not. The rule is a safe default, not a law — and following someone else's lead is always correct.
Politeness is learnable in a fortnight
Unlike an accent or a vocabulary, this part is finite: a greeting reflex, the conditional for requests, and two closing formulas. Fifteen days of attention, and you stop sounding abrupt in a language where sounding abrupt closes doors quietly.
See also: how long it takes · rates · all the guides