"I need to buy a new bra."
Translation:J'ai besoin d'acheter un nouveau soutien-gorge.
20 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
It can be. Since that wasn't accepted, I decided to try out other alternatives to their answer (as I usually do so I can report them as correct solutions).
To my surprise, they accept "il me faut acheter un nouveau soutien-gorge" but not "je dois acheter un nouveau soutien-gorge". Didn't have the chance to try "Il faut que j'achète un nouveau soutien-gorge".
1534
Even more interesting, in Spanish a penis is feminine. (although, to be fair, it is masculine in French.)
There's no pattern, really. You just need to memorize the definite article every time you learn a new noun. There are no shortcuts. Some people will tell you to look at the ending of the word, but those are good only about 80% of the time. I don't like those odds.
FYI, if you get soutien-gorge in the plural, it is not soutien-gorges, but rather soutiens-gorge. I got that one wrong the first time I saw it.
There's a feminine word for it in french too - une bite.
The "shortcuts" are useful but they shouldn't be relied on. They should be used when you forgot the gender of a word or when looking at one you've never seen before.
- 1312
Un soutien is masculine in french, therefore un souien-gorge is masculine. There are no objective reasons for a word to be masculine or feminine. Nobody decides these things.
- 470
a mon avis, masculine and feminine are just ways of designating two groups. you could just as well call the groups white and black, or A and B, or Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Again, wouldn't you be buying a brand new bra and so "neuf" should be used here?
I suspect that either nouveau or neuf would work here, the difference being which aspect of "new" is being stressed. Nouveau doesn't imply she doesn't care whether its brand new. I suspect quite the contrary: it's so obviously going to be brand new that she doesn't need to highlight that.
Perhaps a native speaker could confirm my ramblings or put me in my place. ;)
