- Forum >
- Topic: French >
- "You are not going to arrive …
"You are not going to arrive there."
Translation:Vous n'allez pas y arriver.
13 Comments
If you know spanish, portuguese or even japanese, you know that there is three kinds of demonstrative pronouns. I will use spanish since there are a lot of people learning it in this thread:
- Este/Esta = this = something really close.
- Ese/Esa = this/that = something farther but still close
- Aquel/Aquela = that = something really far
In French we don't have three kinds of demonstratives, but we did have three kinds of position adverbs:
- Ici = here = where we are
- Là = there = not here, but not far neither
- Là-bas = there = farther away, where you need to point out with your finger, and farther.
Examples : - "Je crois que c'est ici" = I think it's here - "Où est mon chapeau? Il est là" = Where is my hat? There. - "Tu n'as pas vu mon chien? Oui, il est là-bas" Dit-il en pointant le chien du doigt = Did you see my dog? Yes, it is over there. - "Oú est la banque? Elle est là-bas, après le supermarché" = Where is the bank? It's over there, after the supermarket.
Note that we also have the expression 'ici-bas", meaning "down here", usually to define "here' but in a larger scale, such as a town or a country. But it's rather rare, it's more a figure of speech to give more style to a sentence.
- Il ne pleut jamais ici-bas = It's never raining down here