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What does 'en' in French mean in English ?


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And what does your wife say it means ALBF????

I use it without thinking, but there again, when I speak french IF I started thinking about how I was going to say things, I would not be able to say anything.

I yabber, which I believe comes from that prehistoric term of yabber dabber do.......... or maybe not[:D]

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[quote user="EuroTrash"]It's a bit like saying What does "to" in English mean in French.

It means what it means, according to context. And according to what it means, that's how you translate it.[/quote]

I like the word nach in German. It can mean either coming from or going to depending on the sentence. Dessous and dessus can be confusing in spoken French as well.
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I have real problems with that, I can understand it when spoken to me because usually the French will pronounce them differently but its beyond my tongue to do so and i am mentally hampered in composing my speech in thinking is it en or au, sus or sous, I have to think of a sous sol as being under the house and then I can speak but then my prononcialtion confuses the listener.

 

Bislama is my favorite, Blong for everything!!

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You can understand the confusion. Most French people, indeed many people from elsewhere, too, have trouble with translating "their" en into whatever it should be in Engish,specifically when it's being used as a preposition of place.

Je vais en Angleterre. How many times do you hear that translated as "I go in England"? ( yeah, the whole "ing" thing stumps 'em too).

Context is everything.

See, "en" means so many things in English as a preposition...and it doesn't marry up too well with French.

I was born in Bolton, in England, in the UK, in the hospital, in October...

à Bolton, en Angleterre, au Royaume-Uni, à l'hôpital, en Octobre..

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English is not a Wysiwyg language, though. Which is why I get a bit tetchy when yet another "report" indicates that children in UK primary schools take longer to read and write competently.

There may be some truth to the theory that acdemic standards are falling, though that's probably more to do with secondary education, but one of the key issues is that there's little relationship between pronunciation and spelling in English.

Finland is always top of these tables. Finnish, although incredibly difficult as a language, is a doddle for kids to learn when it comes to reading and spelling, because it sounds (to the Finns, anyway) exactly as it looks.
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[quote user="You can call me Betty"]English is not a Wysiwyg language, though. Which is why I get a bit tetchy when yet another "report" indicates that children in UK primary schools take longer to read and write competently.

There may be some truth to the theory that acdemic standards are falling, though that's probably more to do with secondary education, but one of the key issues is that there's little relationship between pronunciation and spelling in English.

Finland is always top of these tables. Finnish, although incredibly difficult as a language, is a doddle for kids to learn when it comes to reading and spelling, because it sounds (to the Finns, anyway) exactly as it looks.[/quote]

How familiar that sounds!  When I was learning Spanish, I was told that the pronunciation is easy as you pronounce every syllable and not like English where we often miss out syllables whilst placing more emphasis on some and less emphasis on others.

I can categorically say that that is NOT correct.  Yes, they may sound every syllable but they sound them in a Spanish way and nothing like the way I make them sound.

Found this out to my chagrin when I tried to speak Spanish whilst on the Compostelle.  Couldn't say "aqua" like the Spanish do and "Zaragoza" was as strange a place to them as it was to me!

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But, mint, that's to do with stress and not pronunciation. French is the same. In broad terms, in French, each syllable in a word carries equal weight or stress, except if you're angry, surprised or otherwise expressing strong emotion.

English, however, is a totally different affair. You've even got words that are pronounced differently just so people know whether you're using them as a noun or a verb....increase, decrease, produce, present, Polish/polish, wound...off the top of my head. And in all those cases, it's simply where you place the stresss which makes the difference.
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