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- "Que suis-je ?"
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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
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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.
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"
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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 ?
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 ?"
