In my fantasy land...

[Keyman009]

If I were to meet Alizée, I of course would want to tell her that she is beautiful. So I went to a french tranlsation site and got a little confused.

In her en concert video someone holds a sign up that says tu es belle but when I translated you are beautiful on the site it came back with vous etes beau

Whats the difference? Why would I want to use one over the other?

Thanks

[Bob]

i would bet its just 2 ways to say the same thing

[Matrix]

In the song she says "no im not im ugly". Someone holds up a sign that says Tu es Belle- you're beautiful

The french have cool ways of speaking and have slang just like us americans and there are many ways to say something.

[RadioactiveMan]

Tu es and vous etes means the same thing, but vous is the formal version.

Edit: That's pretty close to the extent of my familiarity with French. I'm not much of a help with anything complicated.

[aFrenchie]

In her en concert video someone holds a sign up that says tu es belle but when I translated you are beautiful on the site it came back with vous etes beau

Whats the difference? Why would I want to use one over the other?
Tu / Vous: in French (and in German at least, probably more), they are two different words for "you", that are NOT interchangeable. It's about being familiar or formal, and even other nuances. It's hard to explain to someone who's language doesn't have that notion. So I'll point you to this excellent site to learn French (I can tell you that the American webmaster is very good in French!): http://french.about.com
Her page about Tu vs Vous is here:
http://french.about.com/library/begin/bl_tuvsvous.htm

And "Beau" is simply masculine of "belle". Again unlike English, all adjectives are variable according to the sex (people) or gender (the rest: all objects, things, notions, ideas, etc DO have a gender too, masculine or feminine)

Now I hope I haven't discouraged you to learn French forever! :D

[Impurator]

In my humble opinion, German grammar rules are much nastier than French ones! It could be much worse than learning even French though, one could learn a morbid mish-mash language like English - right, aFrenchie? :p

[DJ_Greg]

I found German fairly easy to learn (and fairly easy to forget!) when I was in high school...it's very similar to English, so maybe that's why. But because it's similar to English, maybe that's why it seems to have nasty grammar rules (since English does, too).

[aFrenchie]

In my humble opinion, German grammar rules are much nastier than French ones! It could be much worse than learning even French though, one could learn a morbid mish-mash language like English - right, aFrenchie? :p
I know a very little German. Enough to know about similarities with Tu/Vous though, but not much more. On the other hand, I've very often heard that it's easier than French. But I don't know...

[DJ_Greg]

Yes, that's true...

Informal "you" in German = du.
Formal "you" in German = Sie.