"Il pèse tous ses aliments avant de les manger."

Translation: He weighs all his food before eating it.

[N.Hilary]

"He weighs all his foods before eating them." Should be correct also. Note: 'aliments' & 'les' are both plural. I was going to write: "He weighs all his food before eating it.", but changed it to the plural form because of the use of the plural forms in the French sentence and to see what Duo's response would be and it was marked wrong.

[b_adger]

It was correctly marked wrong, the "food" in English is uncountable and takes singular forms.

[deactivated user]

Come on, we're learning French here :)

[b_adger]

Exactly, and one of the things we are learning is that French and English have differences like this.

[tenalice1]

Food can be pluralised when talking about different types of food so "foods" with "them" is correct here.

[Tim333130]

Thats what I did too

[ckendall19]

why not "foods" and "them"?

[Padi_Evans]

Mais... Pour quoi faire ?

[GordonMcKa1]

De les manger. Shouldn't that be des manger? Our is this different because manger is a verb not a noun?

[relox84]

It's different because les here is a pronoun, not an article. Articles contract with à and de but pronouns do not.

[GordonMcKa1]

thanks. I'm not sure I quite understand but that gives me a good place to start.

[MandyB11]

The les means "it" in this case, so it's a pronoun - he/she/it, 3rd person sing. The fact that it's plural in French is just adding to the confusion, but going on past examples, I think it's just one of those "they use the plural whereas we use the singular" phrases/idioms/whatever (or vice versa). If les was an article (the/a/an...), les would mean "the" in the 3rd person plural.

So being a pronoun, de + les = the same thing; de + les. Were it an article; de + les = des. (in singular masc. article, de + le = du.)

When it's a pronoun + à; à + les = à les. As an article = aux.

Masc. sing. pron: à + le = à le; the article would be au.

Feminine singular articles & pronouns will be de la, and à la, irrespective.

This is how I understand the explanation! I hope I'm right!

[MandyB11]

Meant to add, please correct me if I'm wrong!

[b_adger]

in "avant de les manger" the "les" means "them": "before (avant de) them (les) eating (manger)". In English the word order is different, we say "before eating them".

However, because the subject is food, which in English is uncountable, we use the singular form, so it becomes "before eating it"

[Mike716479]

This should have be foods and them!

[Bill237999]

"He is weighing all his food before eating it" is not accepted - reported. Duo frequently seems to miss including both forms of present tense.