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French "It’s enough"

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16 messages over 2 pages: 1
Spinchäeb Ape
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 Message 9 of 16
01 December 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged 
vermillon wrote:
It's not only a different register.

If you mean to say "it's enough!" in an annoyed fashion (i.e. "I've had enough!"), then you can say "Ça suffit!" (or "Cela suffit!" if you think of yourself as some kind of pedantic elite...), but not "C'est suffisant".

"C'est suffisant" is merely the statement that something is enough for a certain task/situation. If you're traveling to France for a week and ask me how much money you should bring there, it would be perfectly correct to answer "400€ c'est suffisant".


Sounds like "c'est suffisant" may be about equivalent to our English, "it's sufficient."
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FELlX
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 Message 10 of 16
02 December 2012 at 1:33am | IP Logged 
Yes, it is. "Ça suffit !" means "Enough!".
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Cavesa
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 Message 11 of 16
02 December 2012 at 3:50am | IP Logged 
Don't trust the google translator, unless you want to sound like a buggy machine mixed
with a caveman.
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Spinchäeb Ape
Diglot
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 Message 12 of 16
02 December 2012 at 9:36am | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
Don't trust the google translator, unless you want to sound like a buggy machine mixed
with a caveman.


I don't. I know to take what it suggests with a grain of salt. It almost always gets very simple stuff right like "I have a cat," but as language gets more complex, the quality of GT's results go down.
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Iversen
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 Message 13 of 16
03 December 2012 at 11:23am | IP Logged 
Use Google (with caution) from another language into your own, because there you can normally see when something has gone terribly wrong. Using it in the other direction is at your own peril.

As for *"c'est suffit" I have looked through the first four pages of Google hits, and my general impression is that most of the responsable writers are foreigners battling with the French language (and its orthography):

o my cafe latte
10.02.03 : huit, c'est suffit

Alors si je le traduis en anglais, est-ce que c'est suffit d'écrire quelquechose comme "ne sachant pas conjuger les verbes correctement." ?


Sometimes the "c'est" and the "suffit" belong to different phrases:

j'ai un sujet de dissertation a fair mais j'arrive pas a démarrer le sujet c'est: "suffit- il-d'être doué pour être artiste?" j'aimerais avoir un pe ud'aide

The only slim chance that any construction with "c'est suffit" might be uttered by a native Frenchman would be in a construction derived from the word "suffit" in isolation, but I have yet to see an example which with total certainty is produced by a native speaker.

c'est suffit. bye bye beast

Edited by Iversen on 04 December 2012 at 1:37pm

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shk00design
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 Message 14 of 16
04 December 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged 
Did someone say Google?

Based on personal experience someone at work came from a French-speaking country Tunisia
when he was very young. There was a training manual that needs to be translated from
English to French. The guy did the whole document with Google translate and the people
who know French at work laughed. The words may be correct but used in all sorts of
context unrelated to what a paragraph is about.

Recently I got a letter translated from Chinese to English. A word: 打風 (dafeng). A
fairly fluent Chinese person would know I'm referring: "to be hit by a storm". On Google
it came out as "fighting the wind". Google translate for single words probably but don't
count on it for complete paragraphs.
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Spinchäeb Ape
Diglot
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 Message 15 of 16
04 December 2012 at 11:27pm | IP Logged 
I've found some limited usefulness with Google Translate (and Bing Translate) when working with the Pimsleur recordings. The people on the recording will say a phrase in English and then in French. I can put the English into GT and it will usually be the same as what they're saying in French. This is working because 1. They're very simple phrases and 2. I can usually tell whether it's right because I can hear the audio French on the recording.

I really wish Pimsleur had just provided transcripts, but for whatever reason, they don't believe in that. It is a good learning tool overall. I like it. It's just not the complete package. (I don't believe anything is.)
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lecavaleur
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 Message 16 of 16
09 December 2012 at 2:49pm | IP Logged 
I can't tell if this has been sufficiently established on this thread yet, but I just
want everyone to be assured that "c'est suffit" does NOT exist. You can't put a
verb conjugated into the 3rd person present form after the word "c'est". It would be the
equivalent of "this is suffices", and just wouldn't make sense at all.

It's either "Ça suffit" or "C'est suffisant", which, as someone else already explained,
are not necessarily used interchangeably.


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