"Il ne faut pas confondre vitesse et précipitation."
Translation:Haste makes waste.
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Nope, fizzycyst is correct.
The words that follow a preposition are called the object of a preposition. In this case, the words 'us Brits' are the object of the preposition 'by'.
The object of a preposition is always in what is called the objective case. In English, pronouns change in the objective case. For example, 'she' changes to 'her' when we say something like "The package is for her". In our example from above, 'we' changes to 'us'.
We use 'we' when it is the subject of a verb. E.g., "We Brits love our tea". Here, 'We Brits' is the subject of the verb 'love'.
There is a simple trick you can use to determine whether to use 'we' or 'us' in a statement if you are unsure:
Simply remove the noun from the phrase in question and decide which pronoun would be used on its own.
"We Brits love our tea."
"We love our tea" is correct, whereas "Us love our tea" is incorrect.
"'More haste, less speed' is said by us Brits."
"'More haste, less speed' is said by us" is correct, whereas "'More haste, less speed' is said by we" is incorrect.
Your examples of 'us rich folk', 'us homeless', and 'us children' would all be correct grammar if they were objects of prepositions. For example, "Will nobody think of us homeless?" is correct.
If the homeless were the subject, it would be 'we homeless'. E.g., "We homeless are just trying to get by".
1903
I'm Canadian and have never heard it either. Maybe it didn't make its way to English-speaking North America.
I'm curious why the correct sentence is: "Il ne faut pas confondre vitesse et précipitation,"
Rather than: "Il faut ne confondre pas vitesse et précipitation."
In the former, it seems to me that is it saying: "It is not necessary to confuse speed and haste," while the latter (incorrect) one seems like it is saying: "It is necessary not to confuse speed and haste" - which actually seems more correct when reading it translated verbatim.
With the "ne ... pas" being between "faut," rather than "confondre," isn't "faut" the word that is being negated? I'm assuming this is a peculiarity in French that I need to master! If anyone has any insight, please let me know! Thank you!!
although what you said make sense, I'll try to explain you why it's incorrect.
"Il faut" express obligation, and "il ne faut pas" express prohibition. Although you could translate to "it's necessary", try translating it to "one must" and you'll understand the reason:
Il faut confondre vitesse et précipitation -- One must confuse speed and haste
Il ne faut pas confondre vitesse et précipitation -- One must not confuse speed and haste
The "il ne faut pas" is supposed to show the opposite of "il faut", as "must not" shows the opposite of "must", one express obligation, the other express prohibition, not something that you don't have to do, but something you can't do at all
This phrase is used by musicians, implying you can keep a steady rhythm and play fast at the same time. I have also heard the phrase "slower is faster" which implies you can gain more momentum by being diligent rather than being in a hurry. In french, "haste is one thing, and speed is another" I imagine they are expressing the same concept.
I'm in the UK, and I've never heard anyone say your version - I mean they could, but it would be a variation on 'more haste, less speed'. It just means that if you rush things, you'll ironically end up making slower progress because of all the mistakes.
And I've never heard 'haste makes waste', to me that implies a sense of inefficiency, but not necessarily less speed. The proverb is really about speed and haste being in actual opposition, which is why you shouldn't confuse one for the other, hence the proverbial advice! Maybe there's another idiom for the waste one?
Can someone help me understand how the parts of this sentence in French fit together to mean "haste makes waste?" I'm having difficulty understanding how to get from the French sentence to it's English meaning.
I know one shouldn't try to think in the literal translation when learning a foreign language. Regardless, sometimes it can be useful toward understanding how the component parts of the sentence fit together.
As I understand it,
Il ne faut pas = You must not; confondre = confuse; vitesse = speed; et = and; précipitation = haste;
"You must not confuse speed and haste" is the literal translation, but as an idiom it becomes (in the USA) "Haste makes waste". Other English-speaking nations translate it to "More haste less speed".
Very good question! Did you ever get an answer? From french.about.com: "As a general rule, if you have a noun in French, there is virtually always an article in front of it, unless you use some other type of determiner such as a possessive adjective (mon, ton, etc.) or a demonstrative adjective (ce, cette, etc)." What if the sentence were "Don't confuse love and desire" -- would it still be "amour et désir" or would it be "l'amour et le désir" ??
A more common way to say this idiom in the UK & Commonwealth is 'Less haste, more speed'. It's written this way round to be read as a statement of guidance/instruction i.e. 'Be less hasty and you'll get there faster', rather than a commentary on what happens to people who exhibit more haste.
Here's an article using this version of the idiom as its headline:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3647097/Less-haste-more-speed.html
It's written in the UK's respected Telegraph broadsheet by double Carnegie Medal winning author Patrick Ness (US-born British resident with dual citizenship).
So Duolingo should also accept this common variant.
A modest proposal: I think all of this discussion while valid is missing the point that we should be learning French idioms that are slightly confusing to non-native speakers and have no simple equivalent in any variety of English. We have so many idioms that are incomprehensible to French speakers (I once tried to explain the lyrics to Izzo by Jay Z to a Parisian with zero success)
The confusion here is that the proverb (as per Wiki) is "more haste, less speed," meaning something like "more haste [means, produces or results in] less speed." However, when you are commanding someone to do something, you would ask them to do it "[with] less haste [and] more speed." So really, both orderings have the same meaning, it's just that there are different implied, subtextual words with each.
Putting the cart before the horse is about doing things in the wrong order. Being hasty means acting quickly (and usually without thinking enough) ie a knee-jerk reaction is hasty. An incorrect knee-jerk reaction is likely to slow down the overall job hence "less haste, more speed" (or more haste, less speed) which is a quick way to say don't confuse a quick reaction with a rapid solution to the problem; politicians might learn from this!
To clarify, this phrase can have two very similar meanings in English.
One, it can be a warning that rushing things often creates problems. The following American and British English versions have this meaning:
- Haste makes waste. (If you rush, you'll create problems.)
- More haste, less speed. (If you rush the work, it can take longer.)
Two, it can be a piece of advice/guidance that recommends avoiding haste.
- Less haste, more speed. (Don't be hasty and you'll end up being faster.)
- Look before you leap. (Don't rush into things.)
I believe it is because the French language uses the masculine pronoun as default. I may or may not have misremembered genderless pronouns as being relatively new to the language from my high school French. In any case, I figure at least 1% of any language just isn't going to translate right, especially when dealing with idioms.
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Geez, the French couldn't make that sentence any heavier? Hardly sounds like a turn of phrase, really...
I guess because it's a phrase it's meant to be said generally - a more accurate translation would be "one must not..." Because that's pretty formal and uncommon in English, most people would say "we must not" instead.
"He must not" doesn't really make sense in English, because it sounds like you're talking about someone specific, when really you mean everyone. So even though you literally translated the pronoun correctly, the meaning got changed, if you see what I mean.
It's just something you need to get used to accounting for when you learn other languages - and especially in this section, which is about idiom (i.e. things that don't mean what they literally say)
I don't really understand (again) why you would put an idiom that translates totally different into English (and by the thread most English speakers don't agree with the correct translation) and not give the translation. How are we suppose to 'learn' if we never came accross it before? Honestly this idiom lessons aren't proving very useful - we won't use it very frequently, but you may have had a reason to chose these particular idioms for these lessons. Anyway, I try again once my hearts are gone or I google it and copy the answer - which I don't consider learning...
Well this is what idiom is - cultural phrases with special figurative meaning, that don't follow from the usual literal meaning of the words. Different cultures often use different phrases for the same general idea (so they usually translate differently), and because the meaning isn't literal you can't really guess at the translation.
So really you can only learn by encountering the idiom in full and then remembering it. This lesson is where you come across it. It would definitely be helpful if the full translation were always available as a popup hint, and some of these are really tough to remember (the lack of accepted translation variations is frutstrating too), so I hear what you're saying. They might not be the best fit for the Duo immersion-style teaching method, but at least it's just bonus experimental content and not part of the main tree
No probs! It might help to try and remember the literal English translation too, at lest at first, so you have a better chance at remembering the way you need to express it in French. So you're sort of thinking "the French way of saying 'more haste, less speed' is 'one shouldn't confuse speed with haste'", or something like that.
(I'm still not entirely convinced this is an expression in French, it's not exactly pithy, but hey I've been focusing on Spanish a lot more so what do I know!)
But yeah, this stuff is heavily about memorisation - same as in English, we throw phrases around all the time, they're just ingrained to the point where you don't even need to think about what to say or what the other person means. In a way this is more high-level stuff, because it's about learning to express yourself in a particular cultural style. So yeah, don't get too hung up on it - you can learn this stuff from a phrasebook, Duo's better at helping you to learn language mechanics
This phrase reminds me of a story about Churchill (i think, or maybe an American president...). His wife was rushing him to get going, so he ended up putting both socks on the same foot. Well then he couldnt find the other sock and it took time to figure out what he'd done so eventually he said "Haste ... does not always make for speed". I'm sure Duo wouldn't take that cuz I'm not sure how many ppl know that quote, but that seemed closer to me than "haste makes waste".
If you think about it, they're not really the same thing:
It is needed not to mix up... is awkward phrasing, but it's saying that 'not mixing up' is needed, it's a requirement. If you do mix them up, you've not done what's required.
It is not needed to mix up... is only saying that 'mixing up' is not a requirement. So you can mix things up if you want, and at worst you're just doing something that isn't needed.
So one sentence is explaining a requirement, the other is explaining the lack of a requirement in the other direction. You can argue that they're pushing the listener the same way, but they have pretty different meanings!
I had a different 'problem' than most, it seems. I typed 'He must not confuse speed with haste.', making my only mistake He instead of We when the french line clearly said Il, not Nous. I get that it's an idiom, but I managed to decipher a sentence full of unknown words with minimal help, and I got stung for being too literal on my first try? Bad feels.
This is the kind of section where you're not going to know the answers, unless you can guess the related phrase in English - good for a gameshow I guess! I think the problem is that the earlier idioms gave you the full translation when you hovered them, this one just gave the individual words unfortunately
I'm so getting tired of these crazy sentences, but even crazier translations! I tell you, Duo is a blessing many times, but when it comes to "complications" it really gets entangled. I had to translate this very long sentence as it is: He must not mix up speed and haste And Duo told me I'm wrong replying that the correct answer starts with "WE"???? What's up with that?!?!?! Where in the world is the "WE" in this sentence?
All right, what you have to realise is that these are phrases, sayings. Translating anything from one language to another involves using the correct phrasing so it sounds natural in the target language, and that's where the "we" is coming in. You wouldn't say "he must not confuse..." as a general observation, because people listening to your pearls of wisdom would say "who? Who's 'he'?" For that type of general phrasing in English, we'd tend to use 'we' or 'you', or even 'one must not...' if you're getting really formal. But in French, they use il in that situation. That's all that's happening here. Read the rest of the comments, there's some good info about it!
The other thing is that phrases are little packages of meaning wrapped up in a bundle of words, and it's the meaning you need to translate, often into another phrase in the target language. So your start and end phrases can end up looking completely different, just because of 'how things are said' in each language. Where there's idiom (i.e. things that don't mean what they actually say) the differences can be even bigger, because you're going from one form of poetic licence to another.
This is what good translation is about in the end - casting ideas and meaning and feel from one language to another. But don't worry, you're not meant to get everything right the first time - especially in the idioms section! Attempting it will help you to understand and learn, though.
As an American I had not heard "less haste, more speed" but feel it makes for a better parallel to the French. The sentence concerns how fast you get things done and there is no mention of the quality of the work or the production of waste. Haste could mean that you do thinks in the wrong order and have to redo them repeatedly but it would not necessarily create the waste of the American idiom.
« Il ne faut pas confondre vitesse et précipitation. » = "It does not do to confound speed and haste". To be utterly literal, « précipitation » is the act of falling to earth in a rush, and can mean the same thing in French as in English (kinds of weather that fall to the earth, like rain and snow); in French, it can also idiomatically mean taking action immediately and thoughtlessly (as rain falls).
Haste refers to doing something fast, but there is an idea that one does it TOO fast, that one is so determined to be fast that one does not do a good job. If you pack a suitcase in haste (or "hastily") , you might forget to include something you really need, like extra underwear or the paper you were going to read at the meeting, or you might pack so carelessly that your clothes get wrinkled by the time you arrive. If you paint a room in haste, you might get an uneven coat of paint, miss a spot, even drip paint on the floor., which will mean more time to fix it or to clean up the mess. We have sayings in English, "More haste, less speed" and "Haste makes waste". Roughly they mean that if you hurry too much, you may do such a poor job that it has to be fixed or even done completely over, so it takes more time than one would have spent doing it right, doing it carefully, in the first place.
I'm from London and I understand this about as well as a French person would understand "apples and pears" to mean "stairs" The problem with the idiom is often that it stands alone in meaning and doesn't relate at all well to the individual words of the phrase. I guess that learning an idiom only really comes from hearing it used in context in regular speech.
In our family and with friends, we say: "The slower you go the faster you get there." I owe this any many other idioms to Tony my UK-born and Canadian raised father-in-law who was a perfectionist in matters requiring accuracy, skill and patience, such as tying fishing flies, hand-building cedar-strip canoes, and fishing.