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- Topic: French >
- "Mon pantalon est un jean."
15 Comments
In English you would not say "my pants is jeans" or "my pair of pants is jeans". Sorry.
Mon pantalon is singular in French and we can either write it "my pair of pants" or simply "my pants" in English.
Sadly, 'My trousers are having an existential crisis' was not accepted as a correct answer.
If you see that again, that is a bug since that answer is not in our database. Could you please screenshot it and file a bug report? Thanks.
I keep trying to ignore this but trousers are never jeans and jeans are never trousers in Brit English. Pants are generally under garments but occaisionally unspecified outer garments.
Ma goes in front of feminine objects and mon in front of masculine.
ma jupe → my skirt
ma table → my table
ma chemise → my shirt
mon vélo → my bicycle
mon stylo → my pen
mon livre → my book
I understand that direct translation is never a good thing when learning a language, but "Mon pantalon est un jean" translates to "my pants is a jean" or "my pair of pair of pants is a jean", which is confusing me. Can someone explain why it's telling me that "est un" means 'are' in this sentence instead of 'it is'? Would the sentence not be 'Mon pantalon sont un jean'? Thanks in advance!
"My pair of pants is a jean" is also an accepted translation.
The reason you can't directly translate from French to English and vis versus here is because un pantalon is singular in French, but "pants/trousers" are plural in English, even when it refers to one pair. So the French sentence must have the singular "est" for one pair, whereas the English sentence must have "are". However, if you like to keep the verbs the same, you can use "pair of pants/trousers is...".
