FEAR - Parler de la peur

 

In English we have quite a few* words to talk about fear. 

*quite a few: un bon nombre, un certain nombre

Let's start with nouns, to say "la peur". 

Really there's only one: fear 

• Ma peur des araignées. → My fear of spiders. 

Well, we also have fright but usually it's preceded by "a" and is less general.. Its definition, according to Merriam-Webster, is "fear excited by sudden danger, alarm". I think in French it would correspond more to "frayeur". 

• Ça m'a fait une belle frayeur → It gave me quite a fright 

Then we have the adjectives. 

This is where it starts to get interesting. There's two main ones to talk about the effect of fear: afraid & scared. They mean the same thing. 

• J'ai peur de voler en avion → I'm afraid of flying / I'm scared of flying. 
• J'ai peur des frelons → I'm afraid of hornets / I'm scared of hornets. 

Note how the verb after afraid/scared is a gerund (in -ing from), this is because we're talking about the act of the verb, like with like, love, hate, enjoy: I enjoy flying, I like swimming... "Afraid/Scared of" must always be followed by a gerund (if we're talking about an action) and never an infinitive ("to fly"). 

We do also have frightened: 

• Sa femme se tenait à la porte, l'air très effrayé. → His wife was standing at the gate, looking very frightened.

We also have adjectives that are not the effect of fear, but the cause: scary

• Son déguisement fait peur → His/her costume is scary 

There's also "frightening", which means "effrayant" in the same way that "frightened" mains "effrayé".

• L'expérience dans son ensemble était très effrayante. → The whole experience was very frightening. 

So finally, the verbs

Scare & frighten are the verbs we can use to talk about something scary. 

• Tu me fais peur quand tu fais ça ! → You scare me when you do that! 
• Me fais pas peur comme ça ! → Don't frighten me like that! 

As you can see, "frighten" is more about like... a "sursaut" in these cases. "Scare" can maybe be seen as more general. 

In summary...

Noun	Adjective (cause)	Adjective (effect)	Verb
Fear
Fright	Frightening	Frightened	Frighten
	Scary	Scared	Scare
		Afraid

Hope this helps! 🧛

I didn't include stronger words like "terrify", "horrifying", etc. because I wanted to stick to the basics. Once you know how to talk about fear in these simpler, A2 ways, you'll be able to use different words that talk about higher degrees of fear. 

Here's an article from I Speak, Spoke, Spoken, another from LinguiLD, and yet another from The English Workshop.