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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| I Am Steve Newbie United States Joined 4929 days ago 17 posts - 17 votes Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 04 June 2011 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||
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On French-Flashcards.com, they have a newsletter they send out with word and sentence
of the day. I casually skim through them sometimes. There were a couple of questions that came to mind when I saw one of those sentences. For those who speak French, bear in mind that I'm very new to this, and it'd be nice to have it explained to me, if you would be so kind. Je recommande la lecture de cet article de journal. Why is there is a 'la/the' in front of 'lecture/reading'? Why is it 'recommend to read' instead of 'recommend you read'? I know the basic answer is probably "That's just the way it is", but what are the rules behind this? It's strange that I've learned so much already from various sources, but none of them covered the logic behind sentences like this (so far at least). Edited by I Am Steve on 04 June 2011 at 12:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes  Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 6 04 June 2011 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually it's "I recommend [the] reading [of] this magazine article." (La lecture is a noun) Edited by Doitsujin on 04 June 2011 at 12:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| I Am Steve Newbie United States Joined 4929 days ago 17 posts - 17 votes Studies: French | Message 3 of 6 04 June 2011 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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That makes a lot more sense, but the Flashcard site explicitly translated it as
"recommend to read". Lol. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FrostBlast Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5100 days ago 168 posts - 254 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Icelandic | Message 4 of 6 07 June 2011 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||
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To put it quite simply, why would you trust an online source to do translation more accurately than a human being who actually speaks both languages? I don't mean to be rude here, I simply want to bring this down to the simplest facts to be as helpful as possible.
French and English don't work the same way grammatically. You don't say things in French the same way you would in English, just like you you don't say things in Russian the same way you would in French. Different languages, different syntax and sentence structures. When you translate from one language to another, you don't take language A and make it word for word into language B - this would make no sense. This means that the correct way to convey the idea in English is by saying "I recommend to read" (with the verb in its infinitive form) and that the correct way in French is by saying "Je recommande la lecture" (with the verb in its nominal form). There's no magic operating here, it's simply two different languages structuring their sentences in different ways. All I can is : you'll get used to it. Edited by FrostBlast on 07 June 2011 at 3:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| caracao Triglot Groupie France Joined 5121 days ago 53 posts - 84 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German | Message 5 of 6 15 June 2011 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
Never translate a foreign language word to word. Edited by caracao on 15 June 2011 at 6:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 6 16 June 2011 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
As others have said the literal translation of the French phrase is "I recommend the reading of...", and this is actually just one example of a tendency in French to prefer verbal substantives of various kinds to expressions with an infinitive. But it is also clear that this isn't a clear rule because the infinitival constructions are also common. So the reason that many grammars are silent about this tendency is that it is a tendency rather than a law, and you would have to list idiomatic expressions and non-binding stylistical examples on page after page to describe the phenomenon in a useful way. So just keep the tendency in mind and be on the look-out for examples, then you will learn to learn to use those substantival constructions in an idiomatic way. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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