"Que suis-je ?"
Translation:What am I?
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After becoming several animals during earlier lessons some people might have doubts.
I think you might even be a bull, judging by your photo :P (You're still rocking it though!)
Is the audio rendering of this question accurate to a native French speaker? I picked out the "que" easily, but the "suis-je" sounded like some horrible mashup of "swizzle" or something. I obviously don't have a good ear for French just yet.
SAME! Que.. suige? Sweege? Swuige? Sweeze? Ahahaha
I'll try to hear 'que suis-je' next time
I'm not getting the difference. Sometimes they use "quoi" as "what" and sometimes "que." Is there are distinction I should be understanding?
The suis-je wasn't easy to guess the first time... By the way, Duolingo gained self-awareness.
Who am I? I am Jean Valjean.
(Sorry. Knee-jerk response any time I hear that question due to having seen Les Miserables so many times!)
The question corresponding to "I am Jean Valjean" is "qui suis-je ?", not "que suis-je ?" which calls for a noun and not a name:
- que suis-je ? - je suis un héros
How do you make a word look bold like that? I learnt how to write it in italics. How do you make it bold?
Type 2 stars (**) on either side of the word you want to appear in bold (no space).
Another tip: to post a reply to my latest comment, you just had to click on "reply" just below your previous post.
One of them is that they require a hyphen: suis-je, vas-tu, partons-nous...
does "que suis-je?" not rather mean "what I am?" as if someone were to ask you "what are you?" and you responded surprised with the question "what I am?" to signal that you need time to ellaborate before you give an answer. I ask this because I would rather translate the "correct answer", which is "what am I?" with the french phrase "Je suis quoi?".
The forms and registers of the two languages match here:
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"what am I?" = "que suis-je ?"
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"what I am?" = "je suis quoi ?"
thank you for your answer! I find it still a little weird, I must admit. I would be inclined to translate following situation as follows: Somebody says: "You are CRAZY!" and then the accused person´s reaction would be "I am WHAT?" or "WHAT am I?". I wouldn´t say "que suis-je?" in that situation by intuition, because to me, it sounds like "je suis quoi?" (emphasis on "qui") -if translated word for word- means "I am WHAT?" which is closer in meaning to "WHAT am I?" than "what I AM?", to my ear. I´m not sure, whether my problem is clear... :S
Are you saying that when flip the sentence and put "what" last it would be "quoi"
1843
awesome234
When you say ....flip the sentence .....you could mean change what from subject to object. If so, I believe the answer is yes. It changes form.
Maybe this should be shown in text before it is shown as a “what do you hear?” prompt(I assume duolingo is not yet set up to do this, but it would probably be a good feature to have for the lessons.)
Que suis je?
Bien, je suis une baleine , un garçon , une fille , une abeille , un singe , un cochon , un mari , une femme ... Etc
I thought I remembered from high school French (15 years ago) that "je suis" was a phrase that never got switched to "suis-je" for questions. (Instead I think you used "est-ce que".) Am I misremembering?
"suis-je ?" is the most correct construction for a question (inversion Verb-Subject pronoun).
"est-ce que je suis ?" is less formal and more usual, in particular in speech.
I can run but never walk, I have a mouth but never talk, I have a head but never weep, I have a bed but never sleep. Que suis-je?
You cannot use "quoi" at the beginning of a question:
- que suis-je ?
- qu'est-ce que je suis ?
- je suis quoi ?
- 74
Do you pronounce the last "je" as in the sentence "je t'aime" or as a shortened "je" in "j'aime"?
The sound is [juh] in front of a consonant sound and just [j] in "que suis-je ?"