Voted Best Answer
Jun 22, 2021 - 09:01 AM
Hi Tommy,
1) You remember correctly, however, these structures with "de" are only used before nouns (like "temps", "argent", "pain"....), not before adjectives (like "fatigué", "grand", "cher"...). More concretely, they're used to translate "a bit of" and "a lot of" (something).
So we say:
Ce magasin est un peu cher
Ils sont un peu fatigués
Je suis un peu triste
But we say:
Je veux un peu de pain
Ils ont un peu de temps
Vous voulez un peu d'eau?
2) Here if we were referring to the noun "famille" we would say: Elle est très gentille, in feminine singular form because "la famille" is singular and feminine. Yet it would sound very strange because it's not natural in French to say that a family is "kind". That's why here we've used the pronoun "ils" (they) to mean that all the members of the family are kind, and since we've used "ils", the adjectives has to agree with the subject pronoun, so it has to be in masculine plural "gentils".
Here it would be wrong to use "gentilles" in feminine and plural, because it wouldn't refer to the family (feminine singular), nor to "ils" (masculine plural). And if you said "Elles sont très gentilles", it would mean that all family members are women.
Hope this helps :-)
1) You remember correctly, however, these structures with "de" are only used before nouns (like "temps", "argent", "pain"....), not before adjectives (like "fatigué", "grand", "cher"...). More concretely, they're used to translate "a bit of" and "a lot of" (something).
So we say:
Ce magasin est un peu cher
Ils sont un peu fatigués
Je suis un peu triste
But we say:
Je veux un peu de pain
Ils ont un peu de temps
Vous voulez un peu d'eau?
2) Here if we were referring to the noun "famille" we would say: Elle est très gentille, in feminine singular form because "la famille" is singular and feminine. Yet it would sound very strange because it's not natural in French to say that a family is "kind". That's why here we've used the pronoun "ils" (they) to mean that all the members of the family are kind, and since we've used "ils", the adjectives has to agree with the subject pronoun, so it has to be in masculine plural "gentils".
Here it would be wrong to use "gentilles" in feminine and plural, because it wouldn't refer to the family (feminine singular), nor to "ils" (masculine plural). And if you said "Elles sont très gentilles", it would mean that all family members are women.
Hope this helps :-)
