"The English do not eat soup; they drink it."
Translation:Les Anglais ne mangent pas la soupe, ils la boivent.
29 Comments
"De la soupe" would be grammatically wrong here, since it is a negative sentence (basic rule, sometimes it's a bit more complicated than that). You can say, "ils mangent de la soupe" or "ils ne mangent pas de soupe". In the example sentence, though, the emphasis is not on the quantity of soup, but on what the English (supposedly) do with it. Partitive articles (du, de la, de l', des) are used to express a certain quantity of something and generally mean "some".
your explanation does not make sense the correct answer is la soupe not de soup as you mentioned above
Because it is a generalisation. You always use the definite article with a generalisation.
For the same reason that you wouldn't say "The English do not eat some soup; they drink it."
Actually, what you have written is perfectly acceptable to say in English, it just doesn't mean the same thing as the French sentence you have been given to translate.
Strangely enough, 'The English do not eat some soup; they drink it' would be more true in essence than 'The English do not eat soup, they drink it'.
Speaking as an English person, we eat most types of soup but there are some soups that we drink instead - namely cup a soups.
It is talking about soup in general, not some soup. You always use the definite article when talking about generalisations.
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Je ne suis pas d'accord avec la solutions que vous proposez; ici il faut utiliser le DE de la négation puisque vous ne dites pas "the soup" !!!! J'espère que vous allez QUAND MÊME me répondre à propos de ce que je dis ...
Actually, the English do eat soup - unless it's in a cup and there's no spoon involved!
Les Anglais ne mangent pas de soupe, ils la boivent I thought I read somewhere you don't use an article unless we are using a form of the verb être?
The other accepted solution here, which is more correct:
- Les anglais ne mangent pas de soupe; ils en boivent.
Normally, one uses de in the negative. Remember to use en with de la soupe.
Yes. When you are referring to a nation, unless you know for a fact that they are all composed of females, then you would use "ils". "ils" refers to either a group of all men or a group of both men and women, while "elles" refers to a group of all women.
BAD translation by Duolingo. "they do not eat soup" is not the same as "they do not eat THE soup". Hence, "ils ne mangent pas la soup" is NOT the translation for the given sentence. Please correct it.
French uses definite articles with generalisations, English doesn't. DL correctly sees this sentence as a generalisation and therefore uses the definite article in the French and misses it out in the English.
it depends on the soup, i eat chicken soup cuz there is food in it but if it is just a lot of broth then i just drink it. it can go both ways
Is there a reason that "Les Anglais ne mangent pas du la soupe, ils la boivent" is not correct? I put an extra "du" in front of the soup because I thought it is not specifically indicating a soup in particular.
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Regardless, du would not be right there, it would be de if anything. Du includes "le", so "du la" means "de le la" which makes no sense.
I believe Duo is wrong here. If we say "ils mangent la soupe", it means they eat THE soup. We know what soup we're talking about. But here we're talking about soup in general, and if we say "la soupe", we're talking about all the soup in the world.
But since we're talking about soup in general, it should be "de la soupe", as we're talking about soup, not a specific pot of soup.
Yeah but with negations we use only 'de' so i think it should be 'ils na mangent pas de soupe' if anything.
I thought that you must use "de" with negation? I wrote "Les Anglais ne mangent pas de soupe, ils la boivent."
