Answers
Jan 20, 2013 - 08:00 PM
Anybody have any explanation for this?
Jan 20, 2013 - 09:41 PM
I think that when you swap them around they change meaning to : we ate everything - nous avons mangé tous the last with nous tous just seems grammatically wrong not sure why?
Jan 21, 2013 - 07:36 AM
I agree with Adriana, putting tous last changes the meaning. Also, I do not think tous is an adverb in this case, but I am not sure what part of speech it is. Anyway, Google Translate agrees with the Fluenz translate. It may be an idiom.
Jan 21, 2013 - 09:58 AM
Yeah, my grammatical foundation (in English or French) isn't good enough to sure sure on part of speech - adjective or perhaps pronoun? I don't know, but the explanations about meaning changing do make sense. Thanks.
Jan 31, 2013 - 09:28 PM
Yeah, they're right. It's a matter of "we all ate" vs. "we ate it all."
Feb 01, 2013 - 02:40 AM
As written in English, "we all ate" sounds as if to say, "all of us ate." However it sounds to me as if they are meaning, "we ate everything", nous avons tous mangé, translates to that. Is it possible that's what they were meaning? Which lesson was this from? I'm on level 3 lesson 8, and the past couple of lessons have been dealing more and more with word order. In the context of "nous avons tous mangé" she refers to "tous" in this context as an adverb and she says the adverb always goes between the auxiliary verb and the past participle.
Apr 27, 2013 - 05:12 PM
They say that not everything translates directly to English, but there are times when it can. Occasionally, I have found that if I try a direct translation of each word, it can help show the intended meaning better and then you can translate it again into what would be more commonly said in English. In this case: "nous avons tous mange' " directly translates as "we have all eaten", which you can then change to a more common "we all ate" in English. Versus: "nous avons mange' tous" would translate as "we have eaten all" which is then put in the more common english translation of "we have eaten everything" -or- "we ate everything". It doesn't work all the time, especially with idiomatic expressions, but it is something I always try when I run into some confusion and it will occasionally provide the correct answer.