Excusez-moi, madame, pourriez-vous me dire si ce billet est encore valable ?

Excusez-moi uses vous, which is the polite or formal form of you in French.

• Excusez-moi = formal / polite / addressing one person respectfully or more than one person
• Excuse-moi = informal / talking to one person you know well

Because the sentence also includes madame, this is clearly a polite interaction with a stranger, so Excusez-moi is the natural choice.

Also, excusez-moi is an imperative form, meaning it is literally a command like excuse me.

In French, when an imperative verb is followed by an object pronoun like moi, le, la, nous, or vous, they are joined with a hyphen.

So:

• Excusez-moi
• Donnez-moi
• Regardez-le

This is normal spelling for affirmative commands.

Madame is a polite form of address, like ma’am or madam.

It makes the sentence more courteous and natural in a formal situation, especially when speaking to a woman you do not know. In French, these polite address words are used quite often in everyday interactions.

You could say the sentence without madame, but adding it sounds more respectful.

Pourriez-vous is the conditional form of pouvoir and is more polite and softer than pouvez-vous.

• Pouvez-vous... ? = Can you... ?
• Pourriez-vous... ? = Could you... ?

In English, Could you tell me... ? sounds more polite than Can you tell me... ? The same idea applies here.

So pourriez-vous is a very common way to ask politely for information or help.

This is a standard formal way to ask a question in French: verb + subject pronoun.

So:

• Vous pourriez... = statement order
• Pourriez-vous... ? = formal question order

This is called inversion. It is especially common in careful, formal, or written French.

A less formal spoken version might be:

• Est-ce que vous pourriez me dire... ?
• or even Vous pourriez me dire... ?

But pourriez-vous is elegant and very standard.

Because me is not attached to dire here as an imperative. It is an object pronoun placed before the infinitive.

The structure is:

• pourriez-vous
  • me dire

Literally, this is like:

• could you
  • tell me

French object pronouns usually go before the verb they belong to, unless you are using an affirmative command.

Compare:

• Vous pouvez me dire = You can tell me
• Dites-moi = Tell me

So in this sentence, me dire is exactly what you should expect.

Si introduces an indirect yes/no question.

The speaker is not asking directly:

• Ce billet est-il encore valable ?

Instead, they are asking someone to say whether the ticket is still valid:

• ...me dire si ce billet est encore valable

In this kind of sentence, si means whether or if.

This is different from si meaning if in a condition, although the same word is used.

Because billet is masculine singular and begins with a consonant sound.

French uses:

• ce before a masculine singular noun beginning with a consonant
• cet before a masculine singular noun beginning with a vowel or mute h

So:

• ce billet
• ce livre
• cet avion
• cet hôtel

Since billet begins with b, ce is correct.

Encore here means still.

It suggests that the ticket may have been valid before, and the speaker wants to know whether that is still true now.

So the idea is not just Is this ticket valid? but more specifically Is this ticket still valid?

That little word often adds an important nuance of continuation.

For tickets, passes, offers, and documents, valable is very common and idiomatic in French.

So:

• Ce billet est valable = This ticket is valid

You may also see valide in some contexts, but valable is especially natural for things like:

• tickets
• subscriptions
• discounts
• passports
• contracts
• offers

So in this sentence, valable sounds very normal.

Because this is a straightforward statement inside the indirect question:

• si ce billet est encore valable

The clause is simply describing the current state of the ticket: whether it is still valid.

French does not use the subjunctive after si in this kind of indirect yes/no question. The normal indicative is used, so est is exactly right.

Yes, adjectives normally agree with the noun they describe.

Here, billet is masculine singular, and valable is also in its singular form.

One detail that can be confusing is that valable has the same singular form for masculine and feminine:

• un billet valable
• une offre valable

But in the plural, you would add -s:

• des billets valables

So there is agreement, even though you do not see a masculine/feminine change here.

Yes, it is politely formal.

The clues are:

• Excusez-moi
• madame
• pourriez-vous
• inversion in pourriez-vous

This is the kind of sentence you might use with a stranger, a ticket agent, a receptionist, or an older person you want to address respectfully.

A more casual version might be:

• Excuse-moi, tu peux me dire si ce billet est encore valable ?

But the original sentence is much safer and more appropriate in public situations.

Yes. A direct version would be:

• Excusez-moi, madame, ce billet est-il encore valable ?

That is also correct and polite.

The original version with pourriez-vous me dire si... is a little softer and more indirect, which often sounds more courteous in French.

So both work, but the original is especially polite.

In careful speech, pourriez-vous is pronounced roughly like poo-ree-ay-voo, with a link between the verb and vous.

You do not need a perfect English approximation, but two useful points are:

• the r is the French r
• the -vous is clearly pronounced because of the inversion

French pronunciation varies a bit by speaker and speed, but in a polite question, native speakers will say it smoothly as one unit: pourriez-vous.