"Tu bois du lait et manges un sandwich au fromage."
Translation:You drink milk and eat a cheese sandwich.
51 Comments
Somebody more intelligent than me should clarify this, but the idea is that the cheese does not come from the sandwich, if that makes sense.
Example = Jus de pomme, the "juice from apple", as in, the juice was made from (key word) the apple. Another example would be café au lait = coffee with milk. The same idea applies, if you said café du lait, it would mean "coffee from milk" and that doesn't make a lick of sense haha.
Again, if someone can explain better (or correct me), it would be appreciated for all of us =)!
From your example, you said "coffee with milk", so can we say this =>café avec lait?
That would be an example of simply translating too literally from English. While I'm sure French speakers would understand what you mean, it is not grammatically correct.
Here try this to understand these french contractions: http://www.frenchspanishonline.com/magazine/?p=597
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I know, and also the recording sometimes is difficult to understand, even when played slowly.
I used "you are drinking some milk and eating a cheese sandwich" it said incorrect because it wanted me to use ARE twice, which is redundant in English language i believe.
I would have said 'You are drinking milk and eating a cheese sandwich' i.e. without putting a second 'are' in. Any clues why this form is wrong?
I got marked down for not including a second "are" in the answer, which isn't right. In English, we jist wouldn't repeat that word, it is superfluous.
Can someone explain to me what is up with this : "You drink milk and eat 1 sandwich with cheese"? Why does it translates "un" as a number 1? Is this a bug in a program or does it really mean that because if it does - than how can I tell when "un" is 1 and when is it just "a" or "an" before a word???
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Is it okay to say "avec du fromage"? I remember that Mr Krabs told to Sponge Bob: "Avec fromage, avec fromage!" I thought that he has missed "du", but who knows!
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I think a key is understand that with prepositions you can NOT do a word-for-word translation
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With the new format, the words I type scroll up so that I can't see them. Please fix.
you are drinking milk and are eating a cheese sandwich
is the present continuous not correct??
Is this some unique type of sandwich, or are we talking about a grilled cheese sandwich?
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I eat cheese sandwiches on occasion. Very rarely do I have them grilled so I would think that un sandwich au fromage would be just a plain sandwich. (with some cheese of course)
In these cases, I am pretty sure that "du" and so on are not prepositions but partitive articles. These articles might help: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/foreign-languages/french/french-i/french-i-articles/partitive-articles and http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/gr/det5.html.
I didn't think you conjugated the subsequent verbs after a noun. Am I missing something? Should it not be 'Tu boit du lait et mange...'?
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Tu bois/you drink ....et/and..... (tu) manges/you eat. The second tu/you is understood in French just like it is in English.
So is it because it follows the 'et' that the 'tu' is implied, and 'mange' is therefor conjugated? I know that verbs that occur one after the other aren't conjugated (e.g. 'Je vais voir', the 'voir' is not 'vois').
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Vasdeus
You are correct.
When the verb is followed by an infinitive (vais voir) the infinitive is not conjugated. But here the verbs are separated by et.
The infinitive form is usually translated as to ..whatever....
Eg:I go to see.....
Is there a way to play back our response so we can hear ourselves pronounce the sentenced?
Wait, now I'm confused. Isn't the "du" in "boit du lait" a contraction of "de le"? I answered "you are drinking the milk and eating a cheese sandwich" but it was marked as wrong. Shouldn't "you drink (some) milk" be translated to "tu bois de lait"
And how would I say "you are drinking of the milk" then? (As in, not all of it, but still when I want to specify the milk as opposed to just "some milk", for example when in comparison to the apple juice in the fridge or something like that)
And also how would I say "you are drinking of the bad milk"? (you're not drinking all of the bad milk, but you're still drinking from the carton with bad milk when you have another option of fresh milk)
Thanks!
Peut-on dire: "Tu bois du lait et mange un sandwich où il y a du fromage"? Merci d'avance
Go Vegan. For the planet. For life. For humanity. The animal exploitation industries are so out of hand. It makes me sad to see practice sentences like this. Along with the ones about feeding bread to ducks.
