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- "Les chiens mangent du pain."
62 Comments
136
The 3 definite articles (Le, Les, La) are pronounced differently "Le" sounds like... 'luh' "Les" sounds like 'lay' "La" sounds like 'lah'
Go to google translate, and type in "les le la les le la les le la les le la les le la les le la " and click the little audio button in the corner, it will pronounce it for you and you'll clearly hear all 3 are different.
@Vezhik37
Yes "the dogs eat the bread" is wrong.
"The bread" would be "le pain".
In this exercise we have "du pain" which translates as "some bread". In English "some" is optional so we can leave it out of the English sentence without changing the meaning.
So "les chiens mangent du pain" can translate to either " the dogs eat some bread" or "the dogs eat bread" but it cannot translate to "the dogs eat the bread".
@BSScpa
If we start off with the English sentence "The dogs eat bread" then the French must be "les chiens mangent du pain".
This is because "chienne" is specifically a female dog but "chien" is not specifically a male dog - it is just the general term for a dog.
So even if the dogs are all female they are still referred to as "chiens" unless the speaker wants to specifically emphasise that they are female.
273
I thought "du" can also mean of the, the, some of the... I am not sure I understand why les chiens mangent du pain means the dogs are eating bread. Without further context, why can't it be the bread? If they used le pain in the French sentence i thought that meant like all the bread in the world, so one would say du pain. Help
@BarbaraSti2
"Du" does not translate as "the". In some cases it translates as "some". In other cases it translates as "of the". It never translates as "some of the".
It translates as "of the" when we are referring to possession. So "Le chapeau du garçon" translates as "the hat of the boy". Which of course we usually write as "The boy's hat"
In this exercise we are given "Les chiens mangent du pain". In this case we can't use "of the" because "The dogs eat/ are eating of the bread" doesn’t make sense". So the correct translation must be "The dogs eat/ are eating some bread".
Of course in the English sentence "some" is optional so we can leave it out if we want. This gives "The dogs eat/are eating bread".
If we want to say "The dogs are eating the bread" it would have to be "le pain".
273
That's because they are pronounced the same. Mangent has a little uh at the end, but there is no difference between chien and chiens except in spelling
"le chien mange du pain" and "Les chiens mangent du pain. " are pronounced/sound exactly the same when spoken. The only reason for marking the singular translation as wrong here is that you are dealing with plurals - but because you sometimes put singular/s in plural lessons and plural/s in singular lessons you might consider marking both tranlations as correct.