#1 – Blue shoes or Shoes blue?

In English, we typically put adjectives before the noun, e.g. blue shoes.

In other languages like French, we put adjectives after the noun, e.g. chaussures bleues (shoes blue)
Many English speakers find this odd and often complain about it when learning a new language.

I’m here to tell you that French grammar actually makes more sense than English when you start diving deeper.

Example 1

Imagine you’re looking to buy some blue shoes on a website.
Unfortunately, the search functionality is very basic, so you can’t just search for ‘blue shoes’.

You have two options:

• Search for ‘shoes’ then filter down by ‘blue’.

• Search for ‘blue’ then filter down by ‘shoes’ (if such a filter exists)

Fundamentally, the thing you’re looking for is something to wear on your feet. 

With option 1, if you can’t find blue shoes, you might still find some non-blue shoes that fit your needs.
With option 2, if you can’t find blue shoes, you’ll be scrolling through a list of blue clothing that probably won’t protect your feet very well.

Clearly option 2 is the better approach, and this is how our brains look at language.

When you think about ‘blue shoes’, what you actually think about is ‘shoes that are blue’. 
You don’t think about ‘blues that are shoes’ - i.e. you don’t think about things that are blue, and then shoes within that group.

I like to think of adjectives as filters applied to nouns.

Example 2

Picture a big transparent bag of shoes.
Now think about how many blue shoes are inside that bag - there’s probably a lot fewer.

That’s how adjectives work - they filter or reduce down the scope of the noun in order to help us create a clearer image in our mind.

When you consider all of this, French grammar starts to make a lot more sense…

Anyway, this is the first of many ramblings of a language-nerd, with hopefully for more to come! ✌