#Zeno
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Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.
Make it descriptive, including relevant context, but also to the point. This way you improve your chances of getting a more relevant and specific answer.
Tu aurais un exemple de "de" employé comme "for" en anglais ?
"pour" generally means "for" or "in order to", but I can't think of a context where "de" would mean "for"
« Merci de m’avoir dit la vérité. »
‘Thanks for telling me the truth.’
C’est le seul cas qui m’arrive en tête
Probably better to treat that as an idiom rather than a "de" that means "for".
Right but that would apply generally
Prepositions are mostly untranslateable in the sense that how one language uses its prepositions would be different from how another would use theirs
Rather than asking how to use French « pour/de » like the English 'for', it might be better to offer contexts in which 'for' is used and its parallels in French. For example, English 'for' is used in sentences indicating time:
'She worked there for five years.'
'She's been working there for five years.'
'She'll be working there for five years.'
French « pour » only works for the last one, the bit about a future period of time. It uses other prepositions and constructions for the first two:
« Elle y a travaillé pendant cinq ans. »
« Elle y travaille depuis cinq ans. »
« Elle y travaillera pour cinq ans. »
what is the difference between first and second sentence and why we use depuis and pendant
That’s just how English and French forms their sentences. The first sentence describes something that started and ended in the past (she started working sometime in the past, worked for five years, and is no longer working there); the second sentence describes something that started in the past and continues to this day (she started working five years ago and she’s still working today); and the third describes something that will happen later for a specific period of time (she’ll start working sometime in the coming days for a period of five years).
English is perfectly fine with using ‘for’ with all of three sentences but not French. French’s « pour » preposition only works for future events, not past or present ones.
For the first, because there’s a clear period of five years, it’ll use « pendant », which is a time preposition that is used for past/present events with a clear timeframe. We would translate this in English as ‘during’.
For the second, it uses « depuis » as it is a preposition used to describe something happening some time ago and still continues to this day. We would translate this as ‘since’. We can use « pendant », but that implies the existence of an end date which doesn’t exist here. Notice also that the English sentence uses the present perfect progressive (to have been verb-ing) whereas French uses just the present (travaille).
What I’m saying is that using « pour » for ‘for’ is fairly limited and very context-dependent
As another example, the English verb ‘to wait’ is an indirect verb, using the preposition ‘for’ to indicate an object:
‘I was waiting for Davina.’
The French equivalent, « attendre », is a direct verb; it has no prepositions at all to indicate an object:
« J’attendais Davina. »
I don’t think you’ll get far with comparing equivalents.
Read more here:
https://french.kwiziq.com/revision/grammar/expressing-for-duration-with-either-pendant-durant-depuis-or-pour
Learn about Expressing for + [duration] in French with either pendant/durant/depuis/pour (French Prepositions of Time) and get fluent faster with Kwiziq French. Access a personalised study list, thousands of test questions, grammar lessons and reading, writing and listening exercises. Find your fluent French!