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- Topic: French >
- "Ma femme est belle."
62 Comments
I know i posted this already in this section, but im sure that pretty is jolie.
I remember translating 'ma femme' as 'my woman' on an earlier lesson and it accepted it.
My woman would be correct too, but in the context it seems weird to say my woman.
Yes, there is. Belle: Feminine. Beau: Masculine. Bel: Masculine with a vowel at the beginning of the noun.
That is exactly what I meant, thank you. That's the last time I do anything passed 3am XD
Beau is only used with boys/men, while belle is used with girls/woman. It would be like saying "My son is pretty." It works, but it isn't the best word choice.
It's not that the wife is not pretty, it is that the sentence has been constructed as a device to help us learn the word for "beautiful".
"Pretty" has it's own distinct french translation and to accept "pretty" here could - potentially - lead someone to assume that "belle" means "pretty" as well and never learn that "pretty" actually has it's own word. Then end result being a tiny, but non-negligible, limitation on one's vocabulary.
My woman is culturally inappropriate but it surely should be a correct translation
My wife is HANDSOME?! What are they trying to pull? Is this for real, I thought "belle" meant beautiful.
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beaux is plural for beau, which is masculine form of beautiful/handsome. Belle is feminine singular form of beautiful.
I wrote "pretty" and the app demanded that I write, "My wife is handsome". Handsome is used, by Americans at least, almost exclusively for men. A wife is usually a woman, so unless we are in the numerically less-common context of gay marriage, requiring that I translate "belle" as "handsome" is just ridiculous.
In fact, I think if I said my wife is handsome, I would be implying she is OT the least bit pretty.
When two words in one language have the same meaning, one is not the "direct translation" to the exclusion of another. The distinction that Duolingo draws between "pretty" and "beautiful" is completely artificial. I guess you could trace both "belle" and "beautiful" to the Latin "beata," but in a Germanic language spoken about 1,500 years after Latin turned into a slew of Romance languages, I don't really think that's relevant. Really, the words are synonyms, and the biggest distinction is that one might use the longer one in order to seem smarter.
I would be very interested to see if someone like Richard Wilbur (a translator of French literature into English) considers the distinction important. I very much doubt that he would.
Is there another way to say "my wife" I don't like how 'my woman' sounds, or is that really how that's said?
"Ma femme" is how it's said, not "my woman".
I know, you didn't mean it like that, but that's just the point - French and English are two different things. If we try to directly translate French into English and then pull the meaning from the result we're bound to lose something, or worse: change the perceived meaning (as seen in this example).
So instead of seeing "ma femme" as "my woman" see it instead as a French way of saying "my wife".
Very frustrating that the only acceptable synonym of "beautiful" that's accepted is "lovely"
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Why is 'great' shown in the drop-downs for belle ? .... I used it just as a test and DL rejected it. Maybe great( belle) is only used for inanimate objects ?
It said I got it wrong and translated: "My wife is handsome". You can't say that in English!!
Is there a different way to say, "My wife is lovely?" I think this translation should be accepted.
