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- "Sa position devient difficil…
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Does this sentence have any actual meaning in French? By position, does Duo mean her physical position (location) or a position she is taking in an argument?
Yes I think it should. From the sentence provided "sa" could relate to any object, therefore it could be a neutral. It seems to me they forgot the english neutral because it does not exists in french.
More exactly "sa" could relate to any owner: his, her or its.
Who/whatever the owner (man, woman, organization), "sa" will remain feminine because "une position" is a feminine noun (like all nouns ending in -tion).
Not correct.
"sa" is possessive adjective: sa position, son chien, ses robes...
"ça" is the familiar contraction of demonstrative pronoun "cela": ça/cela devient difficile
100
"Cette position devient difficile" would be correct then, right? (independent of the question asked)
Does anyone have any memorization techniques to help with this situation? What I do is memorize the actual/root word and then when needing to conjugate I just work in the appropriate ending (present tense ending in er - e,es,e,ons,ez,ent). So given that, I read this sentence and thought - dev, is probably devoir with the ent ending so that means its must for a lot of people - which would make the sentence, Their position must be difficult, which is obviously wrong. So any tips memorizing the special cases?
Also, why the ent ending when its Her not Their?
Someone more proficient can correct me if I'm wrong, but 'devient' is not a conjugation of 'devoir' but 'devenir' (to become). As far as memorizing its conjugation, it has the root word 'venir' in it, which is irregular. So, just add 'de-' in front of the conjugated 'venir'. The irregular verbs just have to be memorized separately over time. Thankfully, there are groups of irregular verbs that are conjugated in the same way. But, you need to learn which conjugate the same. For instance, verbs ending '-uire' are all conjugated the same way( I think), but '-oir' irregular verbs have several possible forms of conjugations. Pouvoir, savoir, asseoir, valoir and avoir are all different.
You are right. "Devenir" is a variant of the root verb "venir".
Other variants: Revenir (come back), parvenir (achieve) , survenir (happen), prévenir (warn), circonvenir (circumvent), advenir (happen), provenir (come from), se souvenir (remember), subvenir (support)
Root conjugation: je viens, tu viens, il/elle/on vient, nous venons, vous venez (polite singular or plural), ils/elles viennent.
So if you learn "venir" by heart, you get the others 9 by the same token!
I recommend downloading the free app called Conjugate French. It's easy to use. I toggle to it on my phone while I do the DL exercises.
you can : if you are given the French sentence first, it can be "his position", "her position" or "its position"
