1 verb, 5 meanings: how French speakers really use 'prendre'
Coffee Break French
Radio Lingua Network
4.6 • 4.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Max walks you through five essential uses of "prendre", one of the most flexible verbs in French. You'll see why French uses "prendre" for ordering food and drinks, for catching transport, for illness ("j'ai pris froid"), for the very French structure "prendre quelqu'un pour quelqu'un", and for talking about duration. Which meaning surprised you the most?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, goodjour, and welcome in a new podcast. |
| 0:04.9 | Today we are talking about one of the most useful verbs in French. |
| 0:10.9 | It can also be quite confusing sometimes. |
| 0:13.6 | It's the verb, |
| 0:14.9 | Prend. |
| 0:16.4 | Prend. |
| 0:17.7 | Because that's the thing. |
| 0:19.9 | You learn Prendr as the translation of to take. That's great. That's pretty simple. |
| 0:26.6 | But then you hear, |
| 0:28.6 | I pran a cafe, j'et prie frie. |
| 0:31.6 | And then things don't make sense anymore. |
| 0:34.6 | So in this episode, I'm going to talk to you about five essential |
| 0:40.5 | meanings of Prandr, and their examples and meanings you will actually hear all the time, with many real |
| 0:48.4 | examples so you can start using them very naturally. All right, let's start. Let's start with one meaning that surprises a lot of learners at first. |
| 1:15.5 | And this is when prandre means to have for food and drinks. |
| 1:20.0 | Indeed, in French you don't have a coffee or a crock monsieur. |
| 1:21.6 | You take one. |
| 1:26.6 | By example, I'm having a coffee. |
| 1:28.4 | Or, or, on a beer? |
| 1:30.5 | Shall we have a beer? |
| 1:32.7 | Or, she has a salad. |
| 1:35.2 | She had a salad. |
... |
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