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Get ready to learn everything you want to know about the basic sentence “C’est la vie”.
More precisely, this includes a complete explanation of what it is and how to use it in everyday life with an audio example. And because we care about you, we also sprinkled some super useful stuff like slow pronunciation audio, dialogue example, synonyms and more!
Oh and in case you are interested, you can also find our others sentences pages on this page and all our pages about French words on this page. Enjoy!
Slow pronunciation
Normal pronunciation
“C’est la vie” is a fatalistic French phrase that means “That’s life” or “That’s how it is“. It shows acceptance or resignation to a less-than-ideal situation.
It can be used in two ways…
First, you can use it fatalistically when you can’t do anything about an unpleasant situation or bad news:
But French people also use it about something necessary for life or a way of life:
“C’est la vie” is widely used in other languages, including English.
And surprisingly, it’s much more used in English than in French. Probably because we prefer to use “C’est comme ça” (That’s how it is).