Precious few things can ruin life’s best moments than bad grammar. Should you ever get the opportunity, be sure not to announce a declaration of love with ‘Je suis amoureux avec toi’. This phrase is a literal translation of the English expression ‘to be in love with someone’. In French, we use a different preposition – de. So, the French equivalent of this expression is être amoureux de qn. Note that if it is a female who is in love, the expression will be être amoureuse de qn.

A similar error is made with the expression ‘to depend on something’ in the sense of to be conditional on something. E.g. ‘it depends on your availability’. The tendency is to say ‘ça depend sur ta/votre disponibilité’, but the correct way of rendering this phrase is ‘ça depend de ta/votre disponibilité’. Prepositions are one of those things that give away your lack of fluency very easily, so master their usage as much as you can!

It is worth noting that when the qn part of the expression is a pronoun instead of a noun, it is represented by a special class of pronouns known as disjunctive pronouns or stressed pronouns (pronoms disjoints or pronoms toniques in French). Disjunctive pronouns are so-called because unlike other types of pronouns they are normally employed in isolation or reserved for certain grammatical environments. One such environment is after prepositions: Il m’a avoué qu’il était amoureux d’elle – He admitted/confessed to me that he was in love with her.

The disjunctive pronouns are: moi, toi, lui (third person masc. sing.), elle (third person fem. sing.), nous, vous, eux (third person masc. plural) and elles (third person fem. plural).  

Disjunctive pronouns will be the topic of a future post, so stay tuned! And while you wait, why not click on the Follow button to conveniently receive a notification when the post becomes available? 🙂