DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6156 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian
| Message 1 of 4 11 September 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged |
In written French, the past participle has to agree in gender and number, under a number of different circumstances. The most common of these is when the verb être is used. E.g.
Elle est allée - She went.
This rule also applies when the direct object pronoun is used with avoir or the noun precedes it. E.g.
La musique que j'ai apprise - The music that I learned.
However, according to Bescherelle La Grammaire Pour Tous, this distinction isn't always made in the spoken language. A French speaker might say, "La musique que j'ai appris". Are there any rules or guidelines regarding the spoken language and past participle agreement ?
Edited by DaraghM on 11 September 2012 at 10:50am
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 2 of 4 11 September 2012 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
As far as I know, nope. French speakers can just get lazy with this stuff and it's not
like dropping the -uh at the end of appris impedes comprehension.
The same way I hear Dutch speakers say "als" instead of "dan" or dit/dat instead of
die/deze (or vice versa), making genders disagree.
Edited by tarvos on 11 September 2012 at 12:45pm
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Spiderkat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5817 days ago 175 posts - 248 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian
| Message 3 of 4 11 September 2012 at 4:15pm | IP Logged |
The same rules apply whether it is spoken or writen but some speakers still don't seem to understand why such grammar rules exist or how they work and also some speakers for whatever reason simply don't bother whether they speak or write correctly since they'll be understood anyway.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 4 of 4 11 September 2012 at 4:41pm | IP Logged |
I haven't spent any time tracking what people say, but I would venture that native speakers probably omit it more than 50% of the time with avoir, but probably get it right a lot more often with être, as it tends to work like adjective agreement.
Personally, I suppose I don't usually do it in informal speech, but I can do it in more formal situations. Then again, I'm a translator, so I pay attention to this in writing all the time.
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