miketuan

[jaunty crystal]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

Pro tip: you can rename the thread title with `.tr <thread name>`

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.

[chilly quest]

No.

[plain geyser]

D'ailleurs, could you send your cute profile picture

[chilly quest]

'Il est' would refer to 'l'anniversaire', so saying 'Il est mon anniversaire' doesn't work.
If you instead had something like this:

Mon anniversaire, il est le 5 juin.
It's still more natural to use 'c'est' here, though.

Just as saying

My birthday, it is the 5th of June.
would sound odd in English.

[plain geyser]

Is the comparison to English really necessary? Plenty of 'English equivalents' would sound odd in English while it's natural in French so

So i don't know if it's a good metric

So to speak

Idk tho like imho

[grave hedge]

English and French have a lot of similarities in their structures

and making comparisons like that can serve to give a feel for how something feels wrong

[plain geyser]

Yes but i think it's like cherrypicking when you can show an example in English and when you cant

if that makes sense

So it's teaching someone you can go back to English to check if it sounds ok in general

I mean tbf i do this with Dutch-French somewhat often because of the surprising overlap so i cant really blame anyone

[plain geyser]

Or at least not cherrypicking because im sure theres some grammatical framework in which to view the similarities, but like,, two messages before the current one

[rich fable]

if considering impersonal expressions, I think it works, for example: Il est important d’étudier.
C’est important d’étudier. Doesn't it?
But I feel like "C'est mon anniversaire" is just the usual way people would say it

[chilly quest]

https://www.lawlessfrench.com/grammar/using-impersonal-expressions/

The difference is that 'Il est important' uses an adjective while 'Il est mon anniversaire' uses a noun.

Il est mon anniversaire
-> 'Il est' tries to refer to something
-> This something is my birthday
It's just confusing.

[rich fable]

I see, that's clear to me now, thanks

[outer prawn]

Usually early learners are not able to recognize when the comparisons are appropriate or not, or how to do them in the first place. Later learners and sometimes natives can provide that context to more clearly show why the sentence doesn't make sense - you're linking it with something that matches in the language they know best. It's very very similar to the principle of translation - it can be incredibly useful and much quicker to refer back to your native language when the two are working similarly, but obviously it will not work in every single case. That doesn't mean you should never translate, and it especially doesn't mean no one else should give you an appropriate translation

[plain geyser]

I was just saying bc in this particular case does it really make sense to refer to English

Take for example « c'est trop fun, ce jeu » which has a similar structure to the sentence posed before (Mon anniversaire, il est le 5 juin). Saying « it's so fun, this game » is a bit less natural than « this game is so fun » .

So i don't know if it makes sense, in this particular case, to point out that 'mon anniversaire, il est le 5 juin' also doesn't sound natural in English. There are sentences with a similar structure where it DOES sound fine in French but less so in English (perhaps there are better examples than the one I gave). So if you're going to make a reference to English, then one might find it useful to explain why it is so.

Because otherwise the learner might take it for a general rule (oh, so it's generally weird to say "my/this/the x, it's y" in French [because it is also so in English])

Anyway on laisse tomber