9 Comments
Why is you had not found me not acceptable?
Edit: I found it out! It's because that is the pluperfect and translates as vous ne m'aviez pas trouvé.
also, what do people not understand about 'stop the clutter'? You don't need to tell everyone you've reported something 100 times over.
1741
That is correct. The past participle (trouvé) will agree with the direct object before the verb.
- vous ne m'avez pas trouvé (the speaker is male)
- vous ne m'avez pas trouvée (the speaker is female)
Note that from a written exercise, either "trouvé" or trouvée" is accepted. And since these are homophones, they are both accepted from an audio exercise as well.
- 1741
The gender of the recorded voice is not relevant on Duolingo. It is completely arbitrary whether you her a male voice or a female voice. It just reads the sentence--that's all.
trouvé should NOT be accepted. trouver is an avoir verb in past tense and therefore it's past participle is not gender specific. only être verbs are gender specific.
- 795
Not correct. When the direct object precedes the verb, agreement is invoked.
From: www.linguistics-french.co
However, when the direct object comes before the past participle, the past participle actually agrees with that direct object.
Endquote
The participle has to agree with the direct object in this sentence because it precedes the verb. We don't know the gender of the direct object (me) so either participle gender is appropriate.
Duo follows the French practice of defaulting to masculine when the gender is unknown. But that only makes sense when the gender can't reasonably be known in the circumstances so it can't be assigned. It is pretty hard to imagine a condition where the writer doesn't know the gender attached to me. We don't know because the example has been taken out context but the author would certainly know and would choose accordingly.
As I mentioned in a previous example, Duo has accepted the opposite choice of gender for this very sentence in a previous example.
I think the past participle agrees with the object before the verb. In this case, the "m" must be female.
- 795
You have it backwards. The past participle must agree with the direct object.
In this case the direct object me does not indicate gender itself, so the past participle can be either gender unless context indicates which gender me refers to.
