"S'il vous plaît, dites-moi."
Translation:Please, tell me.
68 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
To me this one sounds like it should. A way to practice the oral comprehension is to use www.forvo.com and there listen to several different native voices reading the same words and phrases.
annag:
A first group verb is a verb (except aller) that ends in -er in its infinitive form.
A second group verb is a regular verb that ends in -ir in its infinitive form.
A third group verb is a verb that ends in -ir in its infinitive form and do not belong in the second verb group, i. e. it is irregular, or a verb that ends in -re in its infinitive form.
All verbs in a group share the same basic conjugation pattern, except for those in the third group.
1840
disons-lui (I changed the pronoun so that it makes sense) for "nous".
I don't get the preceding comment.
Why disons-lui when lui means him, her, it, he? That would seem to require third person singular form.
Disons-nous would seem to mean tell us.
What does disons-lui mean?
Sure, but there's a lot about how we learn our first language that we shouldn't repeat when learning our second language. It would be very inefficient and wouldn't leverage our expertise as speakers of some language. In any case, I was mostly being silly since I'm fine with being thrown curve balls. I just got unlucky with having this one come for the first time on a listening exercise.
Not to me, but I'm used to French. Perhaps you need some more oral comprehension practice? www.forvo.com is a good place to practice that, in smaller portions than Duolingo's full phrases, over and over again and with several accents.
38
Hang on, why is "If it pleases you, tell me" incorrect? DL says it should be "If you please, tell me" but how is that different from my answer? Doesn't "S'il" = "if it"?
'Y'all' is not improper English; it's perfectly lovely English. Besides finding a place in most English dictionaries (with the simple indication that it's a second person plural pronoun and no indication of impropriety), it's used systematically and spontaneously by something approaching half of the population of the United States, as well as many other dialects unrelated to the US.
And for good reason: it fills a linguistic void created when thou and ye fell out of favor (mostly through the influence of French after the Norman conquest, it so happens), and serves to avoid certain kinds of ambiguity. What's actually being promoted by declaring it improper is the same prescriptivism that squashed the spontaneous rise of "You is" and "You was" to fill that void around the late 18th and early 19th century. There is no doubt in my mind that "y'all" has more than met the standard of what makes something part of a language, if we would only get out of the way.
So far from promoting improper English, it would be recognizing the fact that languages change, that "y'all" stands at the forefront of an important change brought about by building linguistic tension. If none of that is convincing, or you think it's too regional, how about the fact that "y'all" occurs with more than 7 times the frequency of "billfold" (a word accepted by DL for « portefeuille ») in published English?