chatpointfrançaise

[hexed cloud]

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[hollow hatch]

Heya so as the funny title I made says, I am trying to understand when or at what context I am meant to put de before quel/quelle

I have tried asking this to few french speaking friends but they couldn't come up with a good rule of thumb

I would really like it if someone can give me a basic idea of when I am meant to put "de" before quel/quelle

doesn't need to be 100% just something to help me decide easier

[wraith rose]

Generally you'll find desquels after prépositions like, à côté de, le long de, tout au long de, au sein de

You can probably just find a list by searching "dont ou desquels"

C'est facile à trouver

[hollow hatch]

alright thank you

[hollow hatch]

I'll admit I did not search, my friends got really stuck (they are french born and raised)

so I just assumed it is quite difficult to explain

[normal badger]

it's prepositions, they're always going to be a pain to explain

[wraith rose]

no, but it's just not really something natives think about

[normal badger]

they're random between languages

[wraith rose]

we just go with the flow

[hollow hatch]

I guess with experience I'll become second nature

[normal badger]

yeah, "de" is easily one of the hardest ones though unfortunately

since it has a lot of usages that visually overlap

but can behave differently

[hollow hatch]

yeah it really can do many things

from what I can see it is mostly tying two concepts

something being made of something

someone coming from somewhere (origin)

or in cases of "des" it behaves more like "some" (quantity)

[normal badger]

lawlessfrench often has pretty good summaries of the usages for prepositions, but there will always be cases where it's just "this verb uses it for some reason"

[hollow hatch]

okay I had an interesting way to decide when to use de quelle, quelle, and dont

my main language is turkish and it is heavily based on french

when I translated all 3 of those

[normal badger]

in your original example though, the "de" will usually be attached to some kind of reference to location in relation to something

[hollow hatch]

they all translated to different concepts

rather than "of which"

and it just like clicked

[normal badger]

yeah

[hollow hatch]

oh I see

[normal badger]

your brain is pretty good at picking up patterns even when you can't fully understand them

I personally find prepositions easier than gender 😅

[hollow hatch]

dont is more like "of whose"
quelle is more general
and dequelle is more like

[hollow hatch]

gender is a lot remembering

which is quite annoying

[normal badger]

so is prepositions

[hollow hatch]

fair

at least gender has a more easier pattern

[normal badger]

I think for me it's mostly that le/la aren't different enough in my head (and there are a lot of things where you don't have an indication of gender, like "les toilettes" or "l'eau", basically anything starting with a vowel)

I dont find gender patterns very useful personally lol

[hollow hatch]

huh really?

[normal badger]

preposition patterns (when they exist) tend to be pretty reliable

gender patterns, not so much, though I'd imagine if you bother fully remembering the exceptions it might help?

the only one I actively use is that -tion is almost always feminine, save a handful of exceptions

[hollow hatch]

-e's are also tend to be more fem but its more of a 65/35 thing

[normal badger]

but gender is weird and can even change depending on region or personal preference, depending on what it is

[hollow hatch]

-elle's are usually fem

[normal badger]

yeah

[hollow hatch]

I wonder how it even came up

[normal badger]

-ette except quartette, quintette, transpalette, squelette, and a few other ones I forget

trompette can be masc if referring to a person but it's rare

[hollow hatch]

this being my 3rd language I sometimes think maybe it is english that is the blacksheep

and not french

[hollow hatch]

excuse me what

[normal badger]

oh definitely

english is weird as hell

it's incredibly hard to master, generally the only reason it's "easy" is bc it's everywhere

[hollow hatch]

yeah with french I did realise how much harder it is to find content I want to watch

I don't get ppl who watch those "learn french by listening to me talk about uninteresting things in french" channels

[normal badger]

lmao

[hollow hatch]

I don't care about this lady's daily life

[normal badger]

yeah I mostly learned through chatting with people

everything else was exhausting

[hollow hatch]

thats bit difficult

I mean I am sure it is the best way

[hollow hatch]

but you need to somehow break that fear of fucking up

[normal badger]

I had the basics from schooling (been in half immersion since I was like 8 or something) but forgot most of it
but it was enough to be understood

usually I wouldnt speak much though unless 1 on 1

and even then I largely started off just reading things out loud

[hollow hatch]

hah I had 5 years of french and only thing I learned was "je ne sais pas parler français" and even then it was wrong!

[normal badger]

lol

why is it wrong

[hollow hatch]

thats actually clever

[hollow hatch]

my bad I used to say it wrongly

putting pas after parler

[normal badger]

ah ok

I would also just laugh along when other people were laughing even though i didnt understand

[hollow hatch]

gotta give it credit, duolingo, with all of its teidious way of teaching, is at least somewhat engaging

[hollow hatch]

ahh yess the peer pressure of language

[normal badger]

it helped me feel more engaged in the conversation hahah

[hollow hatch]

no one wants to seem like they don't get it

[normal badger]

and they seemed to like it

[hollow hatch]

reminds me of my first attempt at france to talk to french people

[normal badger]

oh my first time in france people would randomly speak english to me 😭

i was like ?? i understand you LESS in english stop it

[hollow hatch]

idk how it happened, but basically someone I was trying to rent a place at let me stay while not letting me rent and they had a bbq it was terrifying to sit with 5-10 french people and yo uare the only fluent english speaker

[hollow hatch]

lmfaoo

I find it cute

like its nice that they are trying to talk to me in english

its considerate

[hollow hatch]

I am convinced french people have a built-in "non francaphone" radar

no other way these people know I am not fluent in french with just a look

[normal badger]

oh it depends

sometimes they're clueless

im not sure why they were acting that way with me

ive had quite a few native speakers think I was native

ive also had native speakers think other native speakers were learners

🥲

[hollow hatch]

ohhhh

that sounds terrifying

[normal badger]

lol

[hollow hatch]

never heard of that happen in any language

but I guess french being the way it is

[normal badger]

happens in english all the time

we just dont generally think about it that much, and it's not like we'd switch languages

[hollow hatch]

actually my ex-bf's french(born and raised btw) friend was even worse at it than me so when we all went out ppl though he was a learner

[hollow hatch]

true

what are you going to switch from english to?

[normal badger]

yea

[hollow hatch]

m i n d t o m i n d c o m m u n i c a t i o n

[normal badger]

there are so many accents to keep track of, and not like most of us know any of those languages in the first place

and there's enough variation in native accents that it's not always clear what's going on lol

[hollow hatch]

I think I am lucky on that part

I grew up in a former-british colony where UK still has a lot of say

and that meant my teachers were from also former colony lands

while my friends were american

so I basically learned every english accent ever

well "every"

even then few words from a scottsman is enough stump me

[normal badger]

lol

[hollow hatch]

oh god I wonder how bad this is in french

[normal badger]

newfie accents

[hollow hatch]

maybe I just stay in paris and never leave the île-de-france area

[normal badger]

native french accents are usually relatively mutually comprehensible

[hollow hatch]

the rest of the francaphone region doesn't exist if I plug my ears and go lalalala

[hollow hatch]

huh

thats nice

[normal badger]

of course, "very rural" anything and you tend to get confused

[hollow hatch]

off topic but I may as well ask, I'm struggling to find a way to learn like more "common" french words

do you have any techniques for it?

like I feel like I have some grasp but I lack the vocabulary

[normal badger]

I had a pretty wide vocab from my immersion classes so I have some bias but usually it's not actually the vocab that's the issue in my experience (I thought that was my issue for a while and it ended up not really being the case)
wordreference is your holy grail for that, though. Don't be afraid to look things up. You don't have to go hard on memorizing anything, but if that makes you more comfortable you can try stuff like Anki (I'm not really the memorization type)

it'll also help to try varying your inputs and outputs

[hollow hatch]

what do you mean by this?

[hollow hatch]

woah I didn't know wordreference is a thing. It literally translated the word to every possible french version with meaning

yeah you are right this is the holy grail

[normal badger]

try talking about different topics, look things up when you're not sure how to say something
same thing in reverse, look up stuff and read a bit about it, see how words translate when you encounter unfamiliar vocab
starting with topics you're familiar with or that you're likely to talk about a lot (identity, hobbies, family, learning journey, school, likes/dislikes, pets, whatever), and eventually branching out

[hollow hatch]

that is so obvious yet makes so much sense, honestly I am bit embarrased to not come up with that

[normal badger]

it even does expressions (though sometimes it takes some familiarity to know how to write the expression for it to pick it up)
if you ever can't find anything on wordreference, try wiktionary. It's nowhere near as focused on translation, so it might be harder to parse, but it's extremely in-depth

[hollow hatch]

Even if it is not, I think it would be nice to have an additional tool on my learning path

[normal badger]

sometimes it's just fun to look up words you're already familiar with and see what else pops up

for other tools:
forvo - pronunciation by native speakers (usually single-word, sometimes in a sentence)
youglish - youtube videos containing the word so you can see it in context, with natural pronunciation (can sort by dialect as well, though sometimes it miscategorizes them)

CNRTL is cool but a pain in the ass to parse if you're not used to it, so usually other resources will be more helpful

[hollow hatch]

youglish sounds like actual magic I gotta check that one

oh it uses subtitles to find the word

smart

[normal badger]

LawlessFrench is excellent for grammar (it has a few small issues but it's generally good, but you usually need to know what you're looking for), Kwiziq is good for more guided learning of grammar if you're not sure where to start

once you get to higher levels, OQLF is really good for grammar, but it's aimed at natives so it's generally not what you're looking for when starting out

[hollow hatch]

oh actually I remember my french teacher talking about this one page that has apparently articles based on your level of french, annoyingly she never told me the name of the page. Do you by chance know a website like that?

[hollow hatch]

still could be useful to achieve that coveted C2 fluency

[normal badger]

it's kind of like the not-shit equivalent of l'Académie française (which is the governing body of French in France, but the people who run it are super old and out of touch with the language, so the stuff they come up with often isn't actually used, poorly written, or just.. nonsensical really)

[normal badger]

that doesn't ring any particular bells sorry

[exotic pilot]

maybe lawlessfrench?
https://www.lawlessfrench.com/faq/lessons-by-level/

[normal badger]

the only thing I could think of was lawlessfrench but I've never needed to look for that from them lol

[hollow hatch]

ah still wanted to try my shot

[hollow hatch]

I think it was something like this

but she said you could like

choose a topic

and then choose your level

and then it lists many articles in french about that topic in that level

I tried to find it but to no avail

[normal badger]

https://lingua.com/french/reading/
https://french.kwiziq.com/learn/reading
https://www.fabulang.com/fr/fr

a few different ones

[hollow hatch]

oo I think it is the kwiziq one

she did mention a search bar and boxes you can tick to choose your level

[hollow hatch]

thank you so much!

[normal badger]

kwiziq is really good just in general

[hollow hatch]

honestly thank you so much for both answering my question and giving me resources

I appreciate it a lot

[normal badger]

np! it's what we're here for

when I started on this server I could hardly introduce myself

[hollow hatch]

hopefully I'll be fluent in no time

[hollow hatch]

I'll go read some of these articles now (I want to learn all the colours in french, sounds useful)

thank you so much again

see you around

[normal badger]

colours are a bit funky at times

have fun w that!

[hollow hatch]

[normal badger]

haha

[hollow hatch]

oh non

[normal badger]

it's not too bad

mostly just that some don't change based on gender

[hollow hatch]

noted

[normal badger]

https://french.kwiziq.com/revision/grammar/how-colour-descriptions-adjectives-change-according-to-gender-and-number

if u wanna go directly to that

lol

ignore brun being "dark brown", brun/marron are a weird pair and can both mean the same thing