13 Comments
Why the right answer is 'de Chine', while in other sentence it is 'je suis du Bresil'. Why de in one case and du in another?
I have a bad feeling this will turn out to be "some countries use the definite article and some don't and you just have to remember which are which" but I would also like to know.
Yes, apparently it has to do with the gender / vowel-ness of the country: http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa062400c.htm
The definite article appears if the country is masculine (non-vowel) / plural.
Basically, feminine countries take "de" to mean "from", masculine countries have to use "from the", so it's "du". Also with "in", feminine countries is simply "en", but masculine are "au" which means "in the". Most countries that end in "e" are feminine, the others are masculine.
Because being chinese, i could be from Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and in this case I'm from Singapore. Three generations up, we're still not from China.
Why do we have to use China and not Chinese? Because "Chine" means "China" and "chinois(e(s))" means "Chinese".
My error was not capitalizing "Chine", a bit stern on the part od DL in my opinion.
Opps my error, it was not because of not capitslizing Chine. I apologize.
