Answer Question
Est-ce que = "is it that"
I thought I'd offer this up and see if it helps anyone other beginners...
I'm still getting basic French sentence structure to feel "right" in my head. Something that helps me is to simply literally translate 'est-ce que' as 'is it that'.
Since "is your name Mark" doesn't translate literally sentence structure wise, and is instead "[question word] your name is Mark"....to make it "sound right" to my English brain, I use the literal translation of 'est-ce que', and the structure just falls into place:
Est-ce que votre nom est Mark?
Is it that your name is Mark?, which gets my head around 'is' being in a funny place in the sentence for an english question.
Sure it's pretty obvious to anyone who's any distance along in learning French, but it's helping me out and I thought I'd see if anyone else does this or has any other tricks to help their brain make the leap into the french sentence structure.
I'm still getting basic French sentence structure to feel "right" in my head. Something that helps me is to simply literally translate 'est-ce que' as 'is it that'.
Since "is your name Mark" doesn't translate literally sentence structure wise, and is instead "[question word] your name is Mark"....to make it "sound right" to my English brain, I use the literal translation of 'est-ce que', and the structure just falls into place:
Est-ce que votre nom est Mark?
Is it that your name is Mark?, which gets my head around 'is' being in a funny place in the sentence for an english question.
Sure it's pretty obvious to anyone who's any distance along in learning French, but it's helping me out and I thought I'd see if anyone else does this or has any other tricks to help their brain make the leap into the french sentence structure.