Bonjour à tous ! I have some beginner level questions which I am not sure have been asked before or not. As Jlliagre helpfully suggested I think I might drop some questions here and I'd be grateful if someone could give me some pointers (for example links to existing posts).
I have learned "avoir de ses nouvelles" means "to hear from someone" or more literally "to get their updates". I'd been using this expression fine until I recently started to wonder what "de" does there. It doesn't seem to be either a descriptive de or possessive de.
I tried searching in the Q&A archive but didn't find anything related. An answerer on this page seems to suggest it's partitive but I thought de would only function as a partitive with an article "le/la/l'"?
@Frank Oh so it is partitive? Hmmm I only learned partitives in combination with definite articles. So the partitive de can occur with adjectifs possessifs too? I wonder if it works with other types of words.
lately ive been practicing speaking and hearing the one french vowel i really had trouble with, and im getting it now - the difference between en/an and in. i've been just listening to forvo pronunciations and going back and forth over and over.
for a long time i pronounced vin and vent identically
and main and ment
sans and sein
i can usually hear the difference clearly now
EXCEPT
fin
fin still sounds identical to me to how you might say fent if it were a word
would you say you pronounce the vowel in fin differently from the vowel in vin?
basically i'm wondering if the pronunciation of the word fin has diverged a bit from the standard pronunciation of the in vowel
when i look up vin on forvo and compare to vent, the difference is obvious. but if i compare fin to vent, the vowels sound the same.
@temporary_user_name I pronounce the vowels of both vin and fin the same way and I don't notice a difference between them when hearing these words. The actual way 'in' is rendered by people can vary a lot depending on their accents but vin and fin would stay consistent.
