In this video, we'll take a look at 12 French expressions of love. These expressions are widely used in France and can be very useful if you want to speak better French.

List of expressions

• Falling in love with someone
• To have a love at first sight
• Falling for someone
• Beat the drum
• Putting the ring on your finger
• Having butterflies in your stomach
• An artichoke's heart
• Being a blue flower
• Saying sweet words
• Spinning the perfect love
• Find your soul mate
• Declare your love

Transcript

Hello, this is Elisabeth from HelloFrench! I hope you're doing well and that your French language learning is going well. So today, we're going to look at 12 French expressions that talk about love. So we're going to look at these expressions together and I'm going to explain them to you and give you examples so that you can use them.

So the first expression is probably the most widely used, and that's "falling in love". So when we say that we're falling in love with someone, or that we're falling in love with a girl, we mean that it's the moment when we realize that we love someone, that we're in love with that person.

So, suddenly, we realize that we love her. So, for example, you could say "I fell in love with you the first time I saw you". So, as soon as you saw this person, you felt love for them. Or you could say "Paul falls in love with every girl with green eyes". So, as soon as he sees a girl with green eyes, he feels that he loves her. So the second expression is "avoir un coup de foudre".

In French, lightning is when there's a storm, it's lightning. So when we say "avoir un coup de foudre", it's because we feel like we've been struck by lightning. So, in reality, it's the moment when you fall in love with someone, but not just any person. In fact, it's when you fall in love with a stranger, with someone you first meet. For example, you could say "Romeo fell in love with Juliet at first sight", or "I fell in love with a boy at the station, I'm sure he's the man for me".

It was a stranger and you had a complete crush on this person. The next expression is "mettre la bague au doigt" or "avoir la bague au doigt". It's an expression that means you're getting married, so to put the ring on your finger or you're married to have the ring on your finger.

For example, you could say "after ten years of a relationship, I'm finally going to put a ring on my girlfriend's finger", meaning you're finally going to marry her. With the expression avoir la bague au doigt, you could say, "I've had a ring on my finger for 15 years, and it's not going to stop, my husband and I are still madly in love.

The next expression is "battre la chamade". So when we say my heart is racing, we're saying that our heart is beating very, very fast. For example, if I say that my heart beats fast when I meet someone, it means that my heart beats very fast, that I'm attracted to that person, so I have feelings for them. So, for example, we could say that Paul's heart beats wildly whenever he meets Caroline, he has a lot of feelings for her, he really likes her.

The next expression is "avoir un coeur d'artichaut". In French, an artichoke is a vegetable. So it's a green vegetable with lots of leaves, and we're going to detach all the leaves from the vegetable to get to the heart, and the heart is the tastiest part, the best part of this vegetable. So, when we say that someone has an artichoke heart, we're saying that they fall in love very quickly and very often. So, for example, you could say "Paul has a real artichoke heart, and all it takes is one smile from a girl for him to fall in love".

The next expression is "to be a blue flower". When we say that someone is a blue flower, we mean that they're a very sentimental, very romantic person. So, for example, you could say "he's really blue, he's put candles all over the apartment and rose petals on the floor for his girlfriend, he's very romantic" or you could say "she likes her boyfriend to read her poems every night, she's really blue, she's very sentimental.

The next expression is "having butterflies in your stomach". When we say we have butterflies in our stomachs, we mean that we feel the love we have for someone physically in our bodies. The feelings we have for someone, for example, we can say "I'm very much in love with this boy, as soon as I see him, I get butterflies in my stomach" or on the contrary, I could say "I no longer have butterflies in my stomach, I think I'm no longer in love".

The next expression is "falling for someone". So when we say we have a crush on someone, it means we're attracted to that person, we've fallen under their spell, we have feelings for them. So, for example, you could say "Paul's got a crush on Caroline, he's going to ask her out for a drink", so he's attracted to her, he's starting to have feelings, he's got a little something for her.

The next expression is "sweet talk". So, mots doux are words of love, they're words, they're romantic things. So when we say sweet nothings to each other, we're saying nice things to each other and to the person we're in a relationship with.

So, for example, you could say he's been saying sweet nothings to me all day, he keeps telling me I'm beautiful and that I'm the woman of his life. The next expression is "spinning the perfect yarn". So, when we say that we're in perfect love with someone, we're saying that we're in a very good relationship, that we're very happy with this person, that everything's going perfectly. That everything's going really well. For example, you could say "I'm having the perfect love affair with my boyfriend, everything has been perfect since we met".

The penultimate expression is trouver l'âme sœur or chercher l'âme sœur. So in French, l'âme sœur would be the person who is destined for us. The perfect person for us who exists in the world. So, often, we look for our soulmate, we try to find him or her. For example, I could say "when I met this boy, I knew straight away that he was my soul mate, because we understand each other without speaking and I felt as if I'd known him all my life", I've really found my soul mate, my other half".

Finally, the last expression we're going to look at today is "declaring your love". When you declare your love for someone, you're revealing the love you have for them, you're revealing your feelings, so you're going to tell someone you love them or that you're attracted to him. So, for example, you could say "this boy has finally declared his love for me, I've been waiting for this for a very long time, I was in love with him too".

That's it for today, I hope you enjoyed this video, feel free to like it if you did. If you'd like to discover other expressions, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and if you'd like more information on the expressions we've just seen, or written definitions of these expressions, I invite you to visit our website www.hellofrench.com. See you soon.