"When do I take my horse for a walk?"
Translation:Quand est-ce que je promène mon cheval ?
21 Comments
Among the right answers is "Quand promené-je mon cheval ?" That sure looks like the past tense to me. Google Translate has its failings, but it too comes up with "when I walked my horse. . ." How can it not be "Quand promène-je mon cheval . . ." as Joel Iowan below asks?
I agree that this is tricky because it really needs to be explained.
When you want to use the most formal interrogation form with the inversion of Verb-Subject pronoun, you may be faced with combinations of sounds that are not easy to pronounce. So, the French language has managed to correct these sound conflicts with various additions or changes:
- comment vas-tu ? -> no problem
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comment va-t-il ? -> conflict a-i solved with the addition of a T between hyphens.
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il mange -> no problem
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mange-t-il -> same solution as above.
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je mange -> no problem
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mangé-je -> sounds ge-je don't work well, so an acute accent is added: manGEH-JE
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je me promène -> no problem
- me promené-je -> sounds me-ne-je don't work well at all, so same as above + deletion of the grave accent: proMEU-NEH-JE
Fortunately, for the last two examples, there are other solutions to ask the same questions: "est-ce que je mange ?"; "est-ce que je me promène ?"
After all these years, I had never heard this. It's a good thing that people ask questions and that you provide such detailed answers. Thank you! This was very interesting.
I don't get why my sentence is wrong... "Quand dois-je prendre mon cheval pour une promenade?". Can anyone give me a hint?
You used "dois" which expresses a notion of duty (verb: devoir). And there is none in the original sentence.
1- "je prends mon cheval" is not really the way to say it. "je prends mon vélo" is right, but I would rather say "j'emmène" 2- "promenade" is feminine: "une promenade"
note that you can say: j'emmène mon cheval EN promenade instead of POUR UNE
Well I had a different take on this construction - "Quand est-ce que je prendre mon cheval pour un promène?". But again this was marked incorrectly. This seems to me to be a more literal translation. No?
Verbs have to be conjugated: prendre is the infinitive (non conjugated) form. So "je prends".
"promène" is 1st or 3rd person singular indicative present of verb "promener".
"a walk " is not a verb, it is a noun = une promenade
So a more literal translation is: "Quand est-ce que j'emmène mon cheval en promenade"
Quand je proméne mon cheval, why is that wrong? I was going to invert it to promène-je, but was curious to see if the opposite could work..
