jolie (French) – Structured Vocabulary Support
£2.00
'jolie' means 'pretty', and French learners meet it early when they start describing people and things. What almost no one realises is that there's an everyday English word — one you'd never connect to 'pretty' — that started life as the very same word. They split a long time ago and went in different directions. Knowing they're related gives the learner an anchor in English they already have.
'jolie' began in early French meaning something quite different from 'pretty', and its meaning shifted over the centuries before settling where it is now. Along the way, English borrowed it — and kept the older meaning, which is why the English relative feels so different today. The resource traces both paths and shows how one word became two.
6-panel etymology comic in PDF format
Title panel, historical-stage panels tracing the word through early French, medieval usage, the English borrowing, and later French, and a final panel on its meaning today
Black-line illustrations, designed to print clearly in black and white
Wrapper page with guidance on how to use the resource and what success looks like
Full sources list, drawn from standard French and English etymology references
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
This resource is designed first for newcomers to French who find vocabulary hard to acquire and hold on to — particularly learners with dyslexia, or with the memory and retrieval difficulties that often come with it. It's a supplementary resource. The learner will usually have met 'jolie' already, in a lesson or a textbook, but met isn't the same as retained. The aim is to consolidate that earlier learning by giving the word a story, on the principle that a word with a story attached is easier to remember than a word learnt as an isolated item.
It suits a wider range too:
KS3 French learners building their bank of describing words
GCSE French learners who want their adjectives to feel less arbitrary
Home-educated children working through French at their own pace
Specialist tuition students, including those with dyslexia or poor working memory
Parents working alongside their children, whether or not they have French themselves
Adults brushing up their own French, or studying alongside a child
Anyone who loves etymology and the way words travel between languages
Adjectives like 'jolie' are easy to meet and easy to lose — they pile up quickly when a learner starts describing things, and one looks much like another. Giving 'jolie' a story, and connecting it to a word the learner already knows in English, turns it from one more item on a vocabulary list into a word with a shape they can recognise. For learners who struggle to retain vocabulary, particularly dyslexic learners, that connection is what makes the word stay put. The resource is short by design. Six panels, revisited over time in 5-10 minute sessions, work better than a long explanation a learner reads once and forgets.
Originally created to support one of my own children's learning once the school day had ended.
'jolie' is one of a growing set of describing words in L'atelier des mots. Others a learner builds alongside it include 'grand' (big, great) and 'vieux, vieil, vieille' (old). For describing people in particular, there's 'méchant, méchante' (nasty, mean) and 'ennuyeux' (boring) — the kind of adjectives that turn up together in any GCSE description of a person. For more on where everyday French words come from, The Wordhord gathers free word-history posts on French and English vocabulary.
'jolie' means 'pretty', and French learners meet it early when they start describing people and things. What almost no one realises is that there's an everyday English word — one you'd never connect to 'pretty' — that started life as the very same word. They split a long time ago and went in different directions. Knowing they're related gives the learner an anchor in English they already have.
'jolie' began in early French meaning something quite different from 'pretty', and its meaning shifted over the centuries before settling where it is now. Along the way, English borrowed it — and kept the older meaning, which is why the English relative feels so different today. The resource traces both paths and shows how one word became two.
6-panel etymology comic in PDF format
Title panel, historical-stage panels tracing the word through early French, medieval usage, the English borrowing, and later French, and a final panel on its meaning today
Black-line illustrations, designed to print clearly in black and white
Wrapper page with guidance on how to use the resource and what success looks like
Full sources list, drawn from standard French and English etymology references
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
This resource is designed first for newcomers to French who find vocabulary hard to acquire and hold on to — particularly learners with dyslexia, or with the memory and retrieval difficulties that often come with it. It's a supplementary resource. The learner will usually have met 'jolie' already, in a lesson or a textbook, but met isn't the same as retained. The aim is to consolidate that earlier learning by giving the word a story, on the principle that a word with a story attached is easier to remember than a word learnt as an isolated item.
It suits a wider range too:
KS3 French learners building their bank of describing words
GCSE French learners who want their adjectives to feel less arbitrary
Home-educated children working through French at their own pace
Specialist tuition students, including those with dyslexia or poor working memory
Parents working alongside their children, whether or not they have French themselves
Adults brushing up their own French, or studying alongside a child
Anyone who loves etymology and the way words travel between languages
Adjectives like 'jolie' are easy to meet and easy to lose — they pile up quickly when a learner starts describing things, and one looks much like another. Giving 'jolie' a story, and connecting it to a word the learner already knows in English, turns it from one more item on a vocabulary list into a word with a shape they can recognise. For learners who struggle to retain vocabulary, particularly dyslexic learners, that connection is what makes the word stay put. The resource is short by design. Six panels, revisited over time in 5-10 minute sessions, work better than a long explanation a learner reads once and forgets.
Originally created to support one of my own children's learning once the school day had ended.
'jolie' is one of a growing set of describing words in L'atelier des mots. Others a learner builds alongside it include 'grand' (big, great) and 'vieux, vieil, vieille' (old). For describing people in particular, there's 'méchant, méchante' (nasty, mean) and 'ennuyeux' (boring) — the kind of adjectives that turn up together in any GCSE description of a person. For more on where everyday French words come from, The Wordhord gathers free word-history posts on French and English vocabulary.
