plus...plus / moins...moins (The More..., the More...)
plus...plus / moins...moins (The More..., the More...)
French pairs plus or moins twice, once per clause, to build 'the more..., the more...' — structurally it lines up neatly with English's own version of the pattern, with one small trap around the missing article.
Grammar Comparison
Grammar Comparison
Plus on..., plus on...: the more..., the more...
Plus on mange, plus on grossit. (The more one eats, the more one gets fat)
The more one eats, the more one gets fat.
French repeats plus or moins at the start of each clause to build the correlative 'the more...the more' pattern, and both halves keep completely ordinary subject-verb-object order — no verb gets pushed anywhere, matching English's own 'the more you eat, the more you gain', which likewise never inverts its clauses. The one trap: English obligatorily puts 'the' in front of both halves ('the more..., the more...'), but French uses no article at all here — just bare plus/moins — so resist the urge to insert le/la before it.
Mixing plus and moins
Plus on est occupé, moins on a de temps. (The busier one is, the less time one has)
The busier one is, the less time one has.
The two halves don't have to match direction — freely combine plus...moins or moins...plus depending on how each half changes, exactly as English freely swaps 'more'/'less' across the two clauses of its own version of this pattern. Note how common on ('one/people in general', a casual stand-in for nous) is inside this construction — it appears in almost every example.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
| French | Pronunciation | English |
|---|---|---|
| plus...plus | ploo ploo | the more...the more |
| moins...moins | mwan mwan | the less...the less |
| plus...moins | ploo mwan | the more...the less |
| Plus il travaille, plus il réussit. | ploo eel trah-VYE, ploo eel ray-oo-SEE | The more he works, the more he succeeds. |
| Moins tu dors, plus tu es fatigué. | mwan too dor, ploo too eh fah-tee-GAY | The less you sleep, the more tired you are. |