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- "Les chiens mangent du pain."
62 Comments
I don't see the difference in pronunciation between "Les chiens mangent du pain" and "Le chien mange du pain".
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.
You better try "Les chiens. Le chien. Les chiens. Le chien." in Google translate. It sounds a bit different. But yes, it is hard to hear the difference.
I agree. Unlike English, most often the number is indicated by the article, not the noun (in sound, of course, not in writing).
Les and Le are different like @patlaf said. Mangent and Mange are pronounced the same, but in some cases you can pronounce the 't' in Mangent, but it's pretty rare someone would.
If you listen to them seperately over a period of time, you cant hear it, so listen to one, then another repeatedly les chiens le chien
So does a lot of people. On toast, in cake, ooh, on croissants, in biscuits, in lots and lots of things. NOTE: I don't like cake, so I don't eat butter in cake because I don't eat cake!
I wrote "les chiennes," too. I heard more of a pronounced N, which I've noticed seems to often be the case with feminine words as opposed to their masculine counterparts. I may be wrong about that, but either way I think chiennes should be correct, right?
I agree. I have noticed that when I was learning persons professions. Pharmacienne sounded longer at the end than pharmacien.
@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.
what annoyed me was that I wrote 'the' instead of 'some', which was so irritating.
Correct solution: • The dogs are eating some bread. THIS IS WHAT CAME UP
I was marked wrong by putting "les CHIENNES magnet du pain" and i don't know why because is if I was saying that the dogs are females
- 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".
I literally just got marked down for writing the exact same thing as the correct answer but forgot to capitalize the first word...seriously?
I'm surprised to hear this as I rarely, if ever, capitalize any words, except for proper names, and have never been marked down.
i dont understand why i can put the dogs eat the bread instead of the dogs eat bread
i cant tell the differnece between - du,de,des? and when do we use each one of them? HELP thx
‘Chiens’ sounded the same as ‘chien’ ‘Mangent’ sounded the same as ‘mange’
- 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
N00B Gender Partitive Article Example Masculine du Je mange du poisson. — I am eating fish. Feminine de la Je mange de la viande. — I am eating meat. Elided Masc. de l'
"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.
Can you say the dogs are eating bread? How do you know when its are eating or eat?
Please dont feed your effing dog bread. These sentences are... welp, nonsense
