85 Comments
Surely "The beef is a good meat" doesnt really make any sence and it should be "The beef is good meat"
I agree. One would say "The beef is a good type of meat" or "The beef is good meat" but not "The beaf is a good meat"
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Definitely an English speaking moderator should look into this. "Beef is good meat" or "Beef is a good type of meat." The translation is a literal translation which sound awful in English.
how can we distinguish "est" and "et" by their pronunciation? Are they the same thing?
It is very different. Est is an open e, as in 'when'. Et is a sound at most very rare in English, equivalent to the French 'é'. Try listening to 'été' on google translate to understand the sound of that e.
maricott- est can be pronounced like in wEAther, et like hE you, without pronouncing the H.
For the one who gave me a down vote on that- I'm a native and it's not you who will tell me how to speak my language. Et and est are pronounced like i said.
kaorika- the mistake is that Duo didn't make the liaison : est -(t)- une bonne viande. We have to heat T at the end of EST.
Best way to tell is to listen to forvo:
http://www.forvo.com/word/est/#fr
Side by side they're very distinct
"Est" sounds like the "eh" sound in "west" while "et" sounds like the "é" sound
What is the rule: sometimes it's le vin rouge, sometimes la bonne viande... why is sometimes the adjective before the noun and sometimes behind it?
As we've learned by now, the answer to most questions is "it's pretty complex, but about.com has a good description".
I learned a rhyme at high school to remember which adjectives come before the noun: beau, bon, joli haut, long, petit jeune, vieux, grand gros, mauvais, méchant nouveau, autre, large. I'm not sure that's all of them, but at least it's most.
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I learned it as BANGS: Beauty, Age, Number, Goodness, Size. Bangs go before the noun, everything else goes after.
most adjectives are behind the word, but there are some that aren't: age, numbers, bad/good
beef is a good meat? Singular? Shouldn't saying "The beed is good meat" be good enough?
I agree. "The beef is a good meat" is teaching bad english translated from french. It should be gramatically correct from both sides
You wouldn't really say 'a' good meat, just good meat, but even then it's unlikely you'd ever really say beef is good meat. It seems more likely you'd say it was good food.
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I agree. The idiomatic translation would be "beef is good meat," not "a good meat." "Beef is good meat" should at least be accepted as correct.
Not really. If you're comparing types of meat, say "beef" versus "chicken", or perhaps "beef" versus "lamb", you could definitely say "beef is a better meat than lamb" or similar. "Lamb is a good [kind of] meat."
Pork is a better meat.
Edit: --don't get me wrong., though. I think beef is a good meat, too. I just prefer pork.
And, for learning, would this be correct? Je pense le bœuf est une bonne viande, aussi. Mais, je préfère le porc.
LE boeuf est UNE viande? How can it be masculin and feminin at the same time?
There is no gender in english language but in spanish, french and I think all of the latin languages there is.
Not only Latin (Romance)but Germanic Slavic, Greek, Indic languages have gender
Boeuf is indeed masculine, and viande is feminine; I was wrong on the latter. But of course, language can lead us into all sorts of contradictions.
paupel- If you say : the sun is a star. Sun is masculine but star is feminine, le soleil est une étoile, they're 2 different words and they have their gender, that's the way it is.
Hah, I vacillated between "beef is good meat" and "beef is nice meat". Either way I guess I was wrong.
At a Pompous Cocktail party Hmmm yes, the beef is a good meat. Simply to die for Mr Richard * Beef is a good meat. Which beef? That beef! You mean this beef? No this beef -Punches man in face
:(
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Wow, this woman speaks so fast, it just seems like all the words are garbled up together. Is this really the way this sentence should be spoken? And I also think I would not be able to distinguish anything, if the sentence was solely oral, rather than written down. Quite discouraging, for us new learners of French... Also, why is the o and e in boeuf pushed together, I saw the same thing with oeuf, the o and e pushed together.
In England I don't think that the average person would say that "beef s a good meat" rather that "beef is good meat" Doesn't that mean the same?
They're the same word. the combined o-e spelling is the "correct" way to spell it (at least, it was when I was taught) but has been replaced by the more common separate "boeuf"-style spelling because of the prevalence of computers and the lack of a combined "o-e" key.
Because bonne is modifying viande and the latter is feminine bonne is correct and not bon.
happy- with certain adjectives,go before the noun, such as : beau, bon, cher, court, grand and many more. sometimes, you can put them after the noun to make emphasis, and it can change the meaning a little bit : un long voyage / a long trip, which means distance, if you say, un voyage long, it means time, it's boring and you wish to come back, or something like that.
I think the speaker is a poor reader of sentences bc she says different sounds when speaking slower than reading whole sentence quickly. I only bomb when i have to translate from her voice!!
I spelled boeuf correctly but I'm being corrected. Small errors like these are irritating and makes the app less fun for more advanced learners
Why is it 'le boeuf' not 'du boeuf' if it means beef generally, rather than 'the beef'?
This sentence makes no grammatical sense. The beef is a good meat? It would "This" beef is a good meat... "a" wouldn't make any sense here... is it just me who thinks me?
One of Duo's suggested translations for "bonne" was "tasty". I was happy to learn another use for "bonne" and translated to "Beef is a tasty meat." Duo says it is incorrect. If not here, where can l ever use tasty?
