Je t’aime vs je t’adore, and je t’aime bien

Je t'aime vs je t'adore is a smaller gap than it looks: je t'aime is "I love you", and je t'adore, "I adore you", is the same love said more warmly — but it is also the verb French uses for loving chocolate, so it can be lighter as well as stronger. The real trap is a third phrase. Add a word that sounds like more and you get less: je t'aime bien means "I like you", and je t'aime beaucoup, word for word "I love you a lot", means "I'm very fond of you" — both put aimer in its friendly sense, not its loving one. We counted all of them, as whole phrases, in 626 million words of French film and television subtitles: je t'aime is said 34.3 times as often as je t'adore.

Updated 28 October 2026 · 13 min read

The rest of this page is the evidence: what the dictionaries say, where they disagree, and what French films actually say.

The puzzle: why bien and beaucoup make it weaker

Aimer covers both "love" and "like", and the words around it decide which. Le Robert splits the verb into two senses for people. The first is to feel affection, friendship or sympathy for someone, and its note says that this sense is the one used "with an adverb, to distinguish it from sense 2": un ami que j'aime beaucoup ("a friend I am very fond of"), je l'aime bien ("I like him"). The second sense is to feel love or passion. So the adverb does not turn the love up; it moves the verb from the second sense to the first.

The Larousse French–English dictionary puts the same thing in translations. Under aimer in the sense of love, it gives je l'aime beaucoup as "I'm very fond of him" and je l'aime bien as "I like him". Wiktionary's entry for aimer bien is "to like (as a friend)".

That is why je t'aime beaucoup is the famous paradox. In English "I love you a lot" is more than "I love you"; in French je t'aime beaucoup is less, because beaucoup marks the friendly sense, and only the bare je t'aime says love.

Bien works the same way, and it is the more common of the two: in the subtitles, je t'aime bien is said 3.3 times as often as je t'aime beaucoup.

Where the dictionaries disagree

The dictionaries agree on adorer: it is passionate love when said of a person, and only a strong liking when said of a thing — the TLFi says its sense "swings between two extremes". So je t'adore can be the bigger declaration or the casual one, and the situation decides; nothing in the words does.

They describe aimer bien differently. Le Robert, Larousse and Wiktionary treat bien as the word that turns love into liking. The TLFi calls the bien a faded intensifier and does not say whether aimer bien is weaker or stronger than aimer on its own. Every source here that translates or classifies the phrase puts it on the side of liking.

Aimer for people, aimer for things

Said of a thing, aimer is "to like". The Académie française gives the verb two parts: one for people — an inclination towards union, or devotion — and one meaning to appreciate, to find something good or agreeable, with j'aime beaucoup le chocolat among its examples. Wiktionary puts it in one line: aimer is "to love", usually of a person; "otherwise the meaning is closer to like".

So j'aime le chocolat is "I like chocolate", and to say you love it you need the stronger verb: j'adore le chocolat. In the subtitles j'adore is said 20.6 times as often as je t'adore, and 51.6% of the time the next word is an article, a demonstrative such as ce or cette, or ça — j'adore le…, j'adore ça. J'aime is said 1.37 times as often as je t'aime, and 12.5% of the time it is followed by bien — j'aime bien, "I quite like".

Je t'aime vs je t'adore on screen

• Je t'aime is the one films say. It is said 34.3 times as often as je t'adore. Of every je t'aime, 71.0% are followed directly by a full stop, a comma, an exclamation mark or the end of the line.
• Bien and beaucoup are rare after it. Only 3.9% of the uses of je t'aime go on to bien and 1.2% to beaucoup. Those are counted inside the je t'aime total in the chart.
• Vous goes with liking. With the polite or plural vous, bien follows 12.5% of the time, 3.2 times the share with t'. Perhaps that is because vous, to one person, is the form for people you are less close to, and liking is what you tell them — but that is a guess; the count only shows the lean.

How to make je t'aime stronger

If beaucoup makes it weaker, what do films use to make it stronger? These are the commonest words after je t'aime that turn it up:

Tellement is the commonest — je t'aime tellement, "I love you so much", is said 2.0 times as often as je t'aime beaucoup. Tant ("so much") and vraiment ("really") come next, then plus que tout ("more than anything") and de tout mon… ("with all my…", usually cœur, heart). À la folie, "madly", is in the dictionaries — the Académie gives ils s'aiment à la folie and cette mère aimait son enfant à la folie, and Wiktionary's example for je t'aime is je t'aime à la folie — but on screen it is rare.

Tu and vous: je t'aime and je vous aime

Je t'aime uses te, the object form of tu, the informal "you" for one person. Je vous aime uses vous, which Wiktionary records both as the plural "you" — je vous adore, "I love you (all)" — and as the formal "you" to one person. Je vous aime is therefore either a declaration of love in the polite form or "I love you all", and in the subtitles je vous aime tous or toutes, "I love you all", accounts for 697 of its 9,067 uses. Altogether je t'aime is said 8.5 times as often as je vous aime. Choosing between the two "you"s in general is the subject of formal and informal you.

Saying it back, and tu me manques

"I love you too" is je t'aime aussi or simply moi aussi ("me too"). Inside the same line, je t'aime aussi is said 5,879 times. The subtitle line straight after a je t'aime begins with moi aussi 2,862 times — and with another je t'aime 8,720 times, which counts the reply and the repeat together.

Tu me manques is "I miss you", but built the other way round: the thing missed is the subject. Larousse's example is ses enfants lui manquent, "he misses his children" — literally "his children are missing to him". So tu me manques is word for word "you are missing to me", and the polite or plural form is vous me manquez. Films say tu me manques 10.8 times as often.

Je ne t'aime pas, "I don't love you", is the full negation, and the subtitles mostly keep its ne: 3.6 times as often as je t'aime pas without it.

In writing: jtm

JTM is je t'aime in text messages; Wiktionary labels it internet slang and text-messaging. It belongs to phones, not scripts: in the whole French subtitle collection it appears just six times.

Which one should you say?

• To a partner: je t'aime. Je t'adore says it warmly too, but it is also what you say about chocolate.
• To family: je t'aime, or je t'adore. Le Robert's examples of plain aimer include aimer ses parents, son frère, and of adorer, il adore sa fille.
• To a friend you are fond of: je t'aime bien or je t'aime beaucoup — Le Robert's own example is un ami que j'aime beaucoup — or je t'adore in its lighter sense. It is the bare je t'aime that says love.
• When someone says je t'aime to you: moi aussi, or je t'aime aussi — not je t'aime beaucoup, which moves the verb back to its friendly sense.
• To more than one person, or politely: je vous aime, or je vous aime bien.
• About things: j'aime is "I like", j'aime bien "I quite like", j'adore "I love".

Spanish has its own version of this puzzle, with two verbs instead of one verb and an adverb: te quiero vs te amo counts them the same way, phrase by phrase, in Spanish subtitles. The French course teaches aimer in both its senses, with real sentences from the first lesson.

Methodology, and using this data

• The corpus. OPUS OpenSubtitles v2018, French, untokenised: 106,831,606 subtitle lines and 625,961,254 words separated by spaces. It is the same OpenSubtitles 2018 release the frequency lists on this site come from, read here as running text. The file was streamed once and deleted; the counts are committed with the site's code.
• Duplicates removed. A line was counted only the first time it appeared with the same two lines before and after it, which removes repeated uploads of the same film. Je t'aime against je t'adore comes to 32.4 to one without this step and 34.3 with it.
• Phrases, not words. Each phrase is je, the pronoun and the verb in a row, in lower case. Every apostrophe-like character was made a plain one first, so t’aime and t'aime count together, and t aime with the apostrophe lost counts as well. Je t'aime bien is je t'aime followed by bien, leaving out bien plus ("far more"), bien sûr ("of course") and similar; je t'aime beaucoup leaves out beaucoup plus. The rules are written out in the code and can be changed and re-run without the corpus.
• What it cannot show. Which country a subtitle comes from — France, Quebec, Belgium and others are mixed with no label; whether it was translated from English, in which case the choice of phrase is a translator's; and tone.

The figures on this page may be reused with credit to Verbavia and a link to this page: "Verbavia, from OPUS OpenSubtitles v2018".

Sources

• Le Robert, Dictionnaire en ligne, aimer (senses 1 and 2, and the note on the adverb) and adorer, consulted 2026-10-28.
• Larousse, Dictionnaire Français-Anglais, aimer, adorer and manquer (ses enfants lui manquent); Dictionnaire de français, adorer, consulted 2026-10-28.
• Académie française, Dictionnaire de l'Académie française, 9th edition, aimer and adorer.
• Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales (CNRTL), Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLFi): aimer (the remark on aimer bien and aimer mieux) and adorer (the remarks on its use for people and for things).
• Wiktionary: aimer, aimer bien, adorer, je t'aime, je vous aime, vous, tu me manques, jtm, consulted 2026-10-28.
• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• OPUS, OpenSubtitles v2018, French monolingual text, fr.txt.gz, read 2026-10-28. The counts are computed by scripts/frequency_jetaime.py, and stored with the method in research/je-taime-counts/.