geo 🦆 corrigez-moi svp

[vapid geode]

Please be patient

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

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[rancid sail]

That's a great question lmao I never noticed. I find the same difficulty with translating prepositions from French to Spanish

[honest breach]

Prepositions just don't translate well or consistently from one language to another, ultimately. There can be some loose mappings, but they all break down pretty quickly

Ultimately you just have to learn how they're used in the new language

[frozen fern]

by (the use of an) example

[fair badger]

Yeah, by

[rancid sail]

I think that ultimately, the reason it is like this is that languages are not an exact science and that french speakers leaned towards that for one reason or another through their History

[honest breach]

We can probably blame Latin at the end of the day

[fair badger]

Why do we say "for example"? Idk

[frozen fern]

it's por ejemplo in spanish too

[tulip whale]

yeah i think because i'm an anglophone that's mostly why i am confused haha. we never really say "by example" in english

[frozen fern]

so yeah we can probably blame Latin

[honest breach]

not spanish with por, par and para

[frozen fern]

just learn that for example = par exemple

[frozen fern]

ça existe pas par

en espagnol

en tout cas dans l'espagnol que j'ai appris

[honest breach]

non t'as raison

[frozen fern]

mais oui por et para c dur des fois

[honest breach]

chu comme a0 en espagnol finalement

[tulip whale]

this makes it more clear, so thank you

and merci to everyone as well ❤️

[fair badger]

It's at least intelligible though
But yeah, it can very occasionally be interesting to explore preposition usage but most of the time it's "just cuz" and you gotta just learn it. In this case it's just a fixed expression so it's not super complex

[tulip whale]

that's what's nice about fixed expressions.. you just have to learn it that one way

[fair badger]

A weird one is au moins vs du moins

Both being "at least" in english

[tulip whale]

oh non 😭 adding to my list of things to study

[fair badger]

Du moins is when you're correcting an exaggeration, au moins for everything else basically

[honest breach]

honestly don't sweat that one too much right now. it's a distinction that's ignored relatively frequently

[fair badger]

👀

Ignored?

I've never heard anyone mix them up personally

[honest breach]

it's possible I'm mistaken, won't be the first or last time

[fair badger]

Du moins is like "he was screaming at me! At least, it felt like it"

[tulip whale]

and au moins is like "i should take my medicine for at least another year" ?

[fair badger]

Yeah

[rancid sail]

It will become less of a problem as "par exemple" smooshes in your mind into a compressed "paregzamp" the same way no one typically thinks of "aujourd'hui" as "au jour de hui"

[frozen fern]

it can be replaced with 'well' here so maybe that can help you get the difference

[honest breach]

don,t skull emoji me for being able to admit I'm fallible lmao

[fair badger]

Lol

[rancid sail]

He managed to see in himself what transpires in all of us: the capacity to come short of standards not-necessarily based on concrete metrics, sometimes changing, often out of reach by definition, which, along with their equally obnoxious sibling Comparison for some of the most significant sources of human suffering... LAUGH AT HIM 💀 💀 💀 💀