#binx7836

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

placid oakBOT
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Please be patient

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

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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.

frail grove
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an is used for counting, even if it's just one, as opposed to several.
année is referring to the entire time period within. It's more focused on what's happening during that time, from start to finish

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j'ai habité là pendant 3 ans
I lived there for 3 years
cette année, j'ai visité le Maroque
This year, I visited Morroco

sullen spire
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Ah, so essentially when referring to a plural amount of years?

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Oh wait nvm

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I think I got it. Merci!

frail grove
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the point of using "an" is to give an amount of time.
the point of using "année" is to give context for what was happening in that time

sullen spire
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Also I'm starting to notice this, but is the past tense of conjugated first person singular "-er" verbs just a matter of changing the "e" to "é"?

frail grove
sullen spire
frail grove
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replacing the base -er ending by -é does give you what's called a past participle
but you also need a helper verb for that.
Here, the helper verb is "avoir", conjugated in present tense
je visite => j'ai visité
nous visitons => nous avons visité

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"visité" doesn't change regardless of the subject, the helper verb does instead

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this is a very short explanation, just to give you some insight on that pattern you noticed
this is something you'll need to study in more details in the future

sullen spire
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Oh, so it is mandatory to say it as you would in English "I have visited"

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Rather than just "I visited"

frail grove
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it functions similarly in structure, yes
there are also other past tenses in French, notably what's called "imparfait", and their use cases don't match English one to one

sullen spire
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Gotcha, I will study them when they come! Merci!

cyan scarab
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i think because pronunciation became too similar as the present tense for a lot of verbs it gradually disappeared

frail grove
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French already has enough past tenses as it is kek

cyan scarab
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and the imperfect is usually like “I was doing this and that”, “I used to” it paints the background picture of what’s happening in your account

frail grove
cyan scarab
cyan scarab
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it used to be normal then it evolved au fil des siècles

frail grove
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I am not a historical linguist, so I'm not gonna go out of my area of expertise for this one

cyan scarab
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it is the only logical conclusion

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the other romance language have kept their preterite tense as a normal simple past

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our understanding of it evolved

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and because we lost sounds of letters at the end of words

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many of the verbs sounded identical to the present

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not all but still

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in any case it just so happens that people just started favouring the compound past instead

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and our view of the simple past changed over time as a result

sullen spire
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Oof yeah I know the accented e is different in pronunciation but I was worried it would be very hard to hear, I could see how contextually avoir could be more clarifying hopefully haha

frail grove
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there are vowels that can be hard to differentiate for English speakers, but I don't think that one is necessarily.
The last -e in -er conjugation isn't an actual vowel sound (it does impact pronunciation but is not pronounced in itself) whereas é is fully pronounced

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(-er and -é are pronounced the same btw)

sullen spire
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Gotcha, yeah, that "ey" kinda sound does typically tend to be more discernable.