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French habit diaries: an activity abandoned, reduced or replaced?

Edited by Chris Lee · Updated · About the library

Read eight French diary changes and distinguish stopping an activity, reducing its frequency or replacing it with a different activity.

In short

Look for what happens to the original activity. Je ne le fais plus stops it; je le fais deux fois au lieu de cinq reduces it; je fais autre chose à la place replaces it. Read the whole before-and-after pair rather than assigning a vague frequency word a fixed rank.

Yellow the idea to rememberBlue French to learn

An open blank book lies beside pencils and a game controller in a living room.
An open blank book and pencils sit near a game controller in a living room. Illustration: Atelier

The diary entries below describe one person’s ordinary scheduling choices. They do not rate which activity is better. A replacement also ends the old activity in that slot, so this exercise gives it its own category whenever a specific substitute is named. Use “stopped” when no replacement is stated.

What changed in the diary?

Tap a word, then the box it belongs in.

Ne… plus marks an end, but read the continuation

Je ne regarde plus cette émission says that watching it has stopped. A following phrase can add a replacement: je lis à la place. Without that phrase, the listener does not know what occupies the time instead. Do not invent a substitute merely because you think the person ought to choose one.

Compare the same measure

Three workshops per week and one per week are comparable frequencies. One hour and twenty minutes are comparable durations. A sentence moving from “every week” to “a shorter session” changes the measure, so it would need more detail before you could calculate an overall reduction. The entries here supply clear pairs to avoid that ambiguity.

Je garde l’activité, mais je la fais moins souvent.

I’m keeping the activity, but doing it less often.

For a personal account, state the former routine, the new one and whether it is a trial. Par exemple : Avant, je participais à trois ateliers. Pendant un mois, je n’en garde qu’un. That is more precise than “j’ai changé mes habitudes”, which leaves the nature of the change open.

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