What is the meaning of t'aime?

Answer 1

It means 'love you', or maybe "like you" (see below for differentiation).

The most obvious context for this would be the phrase/sentence "Je t'aime ..." - meaning "I love you".

The subject could be 2nd person - "elle t'aime" (she loves you) or "il t'aime" (he loves you).

The object - the one who is being loved - is always the singular "you" for the phrase you asked about , because ...

T'aime is a contraction of "tu", meaning "you" (singular, familiar/informal), followed by "aime" - the 1st person singular present tense of "Aimer" - to like, to love. Hence, it means "I" + you (singular, familiar) + "love".

Apart from "I/he/she loves you", other cases of the subject ("they love you" - "ils t'aiment", for example), take different forms of the verb Aimer, so don't expect "love(s) you" always to translate back to "t'aime".

In fact, we've only taken a couple of examples in the present tense here - to understand all the tenses and numbers, look up the conjugation of the verb "Aimer".

In the case of talking to a person, which is the only time I can think that it strictly makes sense, as it is in the 2nd person, it would most often mean "love you" as opposed to "like you". Only if qualified by some appropriate adverb, it may be taken to mean "like you" - for example, to a platonic friend, maybe "je t'aime bien!" would be appropriate, meaning "i like you", where a naked "je t'aime" would imply something more than you intended ... (yes, this is counter-intuitive; it isn't a typo: adding "bien" = "good, well", actually weakens the statement, rather than strengthening it).

Another phrase meaning something similar, is "je t'adore" - "I adore/worship you". Whereas you may "aime" your family, you maybe more likely to "adore" a lover.

"Je t'aime" and "je t'adore" are probably the most cited translations into French of the English "I love you".