"On ne peut pas juger un livre sur sa couverture."
Translation:You can't judge a book by its cover.
66 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
1275
They mean something different. This is a statement of fact, while your answer is advice or a command.
1275
One is a statement of fact, the other is an instruction. "Don't eat my cookie" isn't something I'd say unless you can, and I don't want you to (because I want to eat it, because it's poisoned, who knows?) "You can't eat my cookie" is totally different (maybe I already ate it, maybe it travelled to another dimension, who knows?)
33
I don't think that follows in context. The implication here is that you can judge a book by its cover, and that people do, but they shouldn't.
1275
No, that's not right. The implication is that if you try to judge a book by it's cover, you'll fail, because the cover doesn't have the information needed to judge the book. So you cannot judge a book by it's cover, even if you try.
1161
Yup, frequently useful, and people will slow down. I found the French in general and Parisians in particular quite friendly and helpful with my halting French, contrary to what I had been told to expect. Waiters, shop assistants, people on the street, everyone seemed most genial. I could hardly take a map out of my bag without someone coming up and asking if they could help. (No, I'm not a pretty young thing <g>)
1161
I think she meant that she looked for the frequency of the English sentence on Google and discovered it was not very common and then was surprised that DL had her "not-very-common" version in its database. I'm a bit surprised myself. You just never know.
148
Think there needs to be a fix. Instead of recognizing the typo of "it's" it counted it wrong
the english idiom that is the equivalent of this is as dapetras says is "Don't judge a book by its cover." I don't think we should be marked as incorrect for using the normal english phrase. I think the explanation as to why you can't do this is pedantic and another example of imposing french structure on normal English: something that drives me wild!