French Prepositions of Place: À, En, Au and Chez

Choose French prepositions for cities, countries and people’s homes. Compare à, en, au, chez and return journeys with examples and audio.

A destination is more than the English word to

French does not use one universal equivalent of to. Identify whether the destination is a city, a country, a place or a person’s home.

The city name normally appears after à without an article. The same phrase can describe where something happens, so à does not mean movement by itself. The verb tells you whether someone is going, staying or working there. Compare the destination above with a stable workplace.

For a named person’s home or place of business, chez provides another pattern. You do not add à before it. The sentence can mean going to Léa’s place even though no word translating “house” appears. Context supplies the relevant premises.

Now compare a common place noun. Café is masculine singular, and à combines with le to produce au. The preposition has not developed a special meaning reserved for drinks; the contraction follows the article attached to the noun.

Cities and countries take different patterns

Cities commonly take à. Countries commonly take en, au or aux according to gender, number and initial sound; learn the country together with its preposition.

Countries usually have a grammatical gender in French. For a feminine country name, location or destination normally uses en. The same rule extends to continents. A name ending in a written e is often feminine, but several common exceptions mean that the ending remains a clue rather than a guarantee.

Masculine country names beginning with a consonant normally use au. Do not keep the article le as an additional word after au: the contraction already includes it. This pattern works for being in the country as well as travelling there.

With a masculine country name beginning with a vowel, en is normally used instead. That prevents “masculine equals au” from becoming a rule you apply too broadly. Iran provides a familiar example of the vowel pattern.

Plural country names take aux. They are grammatically plural regardless of how you picture the country as a single destination. Keep the whole place expression together when practising a sentence about work or travel.

An established city name with its own article illustrates the limit of the ordinary à plus city pattern. Learn the contraction with the name instead of adding a second article.

Some names without articles, including certain islands and countries, have their own established patterns. Learn à Cuba or à Madagascar as complete expressions. For a first route, choose three real destinations and verify those; adding dozens of exceptions before using a sentence is an efficient way to forget the destination you started with.

À la, au and aux around town

À plus le contracts to au; à plus les contracts to aux. À la and à l’ remain separate forms.

Related reading: article and gender lesson.

A masculine place noun produces au, even when it describes an institution rather than a physical room. You might be referring to attending or visiting the place without saying anything about the exact position of your body inside it.

Before an appropriate vowel, à l’ keeps the preposition and shortens the article. You will hear the phrase as a connected unit, which is one reason isolated flashcards for à and école can feel less useful than a whole sentence.

Dans is useful when you want to emphasise being physically inside a space. It is not a replacement for every English “in.” Being at the station and being inside its building may overlap in reality, but the speaker has chosen a different way of locating the person.

You can take that distinction into the train-ticket conversation. An exact meeting point is more helpful than a perfectly memorised list of station facilities. If someone says they cannot see you, add the physical position rather than repeating the same destination louder.

Chez points to a person or their place

Use chez for someone’s home or a place associated with a person or professional. It does not replace every English at or to.

For the professional premises, notice that the noun refers to a person rather than naming the building. Both this expression and a place-noun expression can refer to the same practical errand, but the words you choose lead to different grammatical constructions.

Personal pronouns after chez are the stressed forms: moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux and elles. The everyday invitation below uses one of them. The form is not the ordinary subject pronoun je because the pronoun is following a preposition.

You may also encounter chez with a company, among a group, or in discussion of a writer’s work. Those are related uses, but they need not crowd your first directions exercise. For travel around town, avoid putting chez before an ordinary building noun such as gare or école.

If you are making a request during the errand, the tu and vous guide helps you choose how to address the person. It does not change the location rule. Keeping the two decisions separate means you can repair a preposition without rebuilding the whole interaction.

The way you travel introduces another set of common expressions. Learn en train, en voiture and en bus alongside à pied and à vélo. These describe transport rather than the destination, so they can occur in the same sentence as au bureau or au marché.

For a bicycle journey, standard written French uses à vélo. The destination phrase remains independent of that choice.

Chez also works with a company name when talking about employment. In that use, it identifies the employer rather than a person’s private home.

Coming back with de, du and des

For origin, de can become du or des with a definite article. Compare the outward and return journeys to see which destination pattern changes.

With feminine country names, ordinary origin expressions generally use de without the article. Compare en France for being there with de France for coming from there. You are learning two related patterns, rather than swapping en for a single universal equivalent of “from.”

A masculine country beginning with a consonant normally gives du. With plural country names, the corresponding origin form is des. Their spellings match forms used elsewhere in French, so check the role they play in the actual sentence.

The plural form appears in the next sentence, where the country is the origin of a journey. This des is a contraction involving a definite article, rather than the indefinite quantity in a phrase such as des pommes.

For a person’s premises, de chez expresses the starting point. This pattern is useful when explaining where you have just been. The prepositions work together because chez still names the type of place and de supplies the origin relationship.

The quantity lesson explains the other jobs of du and des. Identical spelling does not guarantee identical function. In this route, asking “from where?” is more revealing than looking for an amount of something.

Say the whole route in French

Combine a starting point and a destination. Keep the same place names while practising both going there and returning.

Once a place has been named, you can replace it with y instead of repeating the entire expression. The next reply only makes sense because the destination is already clear. The y and en lesson shows how to keep track of that missing information.

Use the same technique when reading a short item in the French Briefing: identify a place, then notice how the writer refers to it again. For further practice, the common-mistakes article includes other constructions where English gives the wrong starting point. End your own route with an actual meeting place and a time.

Your friend is waiting inside the station, next to the departures board, while you are still outside the café looking at your map.

Useful phrases to keep

🇫🇷 French	🇺🇸 English	💡 Context
à Paris	in / to Paris	The usual city pattern.
en France	in / to France	A feminine country.
au Canada	in / to Canada	A masculine country beginning with a consonant.
aux États-Unis	in / to the United States	A plural country name.
chez Léa	at / to Léa’s	A person’s place.
dans la gare	inside the station	A physical location inside.
du Canada	from Canada	An origin phrase.
de chez le médecin	from the doctor’s	Origin from professional premises.

Grammar references for this lesson

• University of Texas: prepositions with places
• University of Texas: à and de contractions