"Les hommes calmes"
Translation:The calm men
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It's because the sentence isn't mentioning that they are calm, it's just saying the calm men. Les hommes means the men, and when it says calmes, it's giving a description to the men, which is calm. In French this happens a lot, they put the noun (men) before the description, whereas with English we describe before stating the noun. Example "the calm men" would be literally "the men calm" in French (Les hommes calmes)
Do you mean always follows the noun? The adjective usually follows the noun, but not always. See here - http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/adjectives_4.htm
@dwlee: Yes the adj comes after pron...@kansungyeo: We cant use l'homme because this one is plural it should be Les hommes calmes and none of the S' should be pronounced so it should sound like (LaY - Um - cowlm) even though sometimes you will hear them pronounce the s after Les to sound like (Lez). The french will understand you either way!!
@ThanKwee: AH HAH.....I seeeeeeeeee... Thank you @ThanKwee, this link is helpful http://french.about.com/od/ :) :)
http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/adjectives.htm
French adjectives change to agree in gender and number with the nouns that they modify, which means there can be up to four forms of each adjective:
"Calme", however, only has two forms because it's the same for both masculine and feminine, but it's "calme" if speaking about one man or woman, and "calmes" if speaking about men or women.
Shouldn't "Les hommes" sort of slur together with the pronunciation instead of sounding so choppy? I realize that taking it slow would help with learning the words but in practice, the beginner wouldn't know that the 's' sort of carries over. That's my concern, though not very pressing I suppose. Just a thought.
If you press the speaker, it is said at a more natural pace and you hear the "s" in les hommes calmes. If you click the turtle, each word is pronounced independently so you don't hear the s in les (because when you say the word by itself the s is silent).
But yes, in regular speech it would sound like lez-ahm
Do the pronounciations of the words change depending on the other words around them? It seems les is pronounced le but sometimes it is pronounced les, and le in le chat is pronounced loo but pronounced le in nous sommes le chat. There also seems to be other words that arent pronounced the same all the time. help?
In direct English, it would be "The men calm" but it reverses to "The calm men".
Direct English would be "The men calm", but it' reversed to "The calm men". Why is that?
I know it's "the calm men", but why does it look like "the men calm?
How do you know of a word is masculine or feminine? I just guessed that the answer was calmes but i learnt in school that though a word may literally mean something manly that doesnt mean its a masculine word. Feminine words have np s at the end right?