It was my grandfather who first introduced me to French culture.
‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,’ he taught us to repeat, suggesting we said it out loud to ourselves each day, as a way of staying healthy and keeping our spirits up.
As I grew up, I got this advice mixed with the American self-help guide The Power of Positive Thinking and it’s only more recently that I discovered that the origin of this gem of wisdom is French:
Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux
was invented as a mantra by Émile Coué (1857-1926). Below you can listen to him reciting it in 1923. He recommended 20 times a day morning and night as the right dose for treating psychosomatic illness and psychiatric disorder:
Tous les matins au réveil, et tous les soirs, aussitôt au lit, fermer les yeux et, sans chercher à fixer son attention sur ce que l’on dit, prononcer avec les lèvres, assez haut pour entendre ses propres paroles et en comptant sur une ficelle munie de vingt nœuds, la phrase suivante : Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux.
Coué was famous in his lifetime, but «la maîtrise de soi-même par l’autosuggestion consciente» fell out of fashion after his death. Freud told us to explore our inner feelings, not suppress them, as Coué seemed to be suggesting.
Today la méthode Coué is still a widely heard expression. But it’s generally used in a pejorative sense, to describe someone who repeats what they want to believe instead of looking reality in the face:
Bien qu’elles restent encore difficiles à mesurer, les conséquences du Brexit, souvent présentées par ses partisans comme moins dramatiques que prévu dans un discours qui relève de la méthode Coué, se font désormais sentir.
Learning French with la méthode Coué
Repeating mantras may not be much good as a self-help tool, but it can help with learning French.
A language is rarely a direct translation of another, as we can see by comparing Coué’s formula itself and the English version:
Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux
Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better
The two sentences mean the same thing, but analyse them in detail and you’ll see they are very different.
- Every is repeated in English: every day, every way. In French we have tous les jours with the article “les” but à tous points de vue without the definite article
- Day is singular but les jours is plural
- je vais is a present simple tense, “I’m getting” is present continuous.
- de mieux en mieux in French becomes “better and better” in English
Why? Well there are answers:
- “Every day” describes “on each day one after the other”, whereas “every way” describes all possible ways. In English “every” plus the singular noun covers both those cases. In French if you want to run through every instance of a defined set (days) you say tous les… with a plural noun. If you want to talk about all possible members of a set you can use tous without the definite article.
- The continuous present “I’m getting” doesn’t exist in French. You can say je suis en train de… but more commonly one uses the present simple je vais.
- de mieux en mieux is an adverbial expression, describing the journey from one place to another, hence de… en… “better and better” is adjectival.
Exploring these differences is an interesting topic in itself for those who have a taste for it. Studying them will help you progress.
But if too much grammar feels a bit daunting, you can begin simply by applying the la méthode Coué. Listen and look out for words and phrases that you think you might find useful – there are plenty on this website – and keep repeating them until best practice becomes second nature.
