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13,653 questions • 29,215 answers • 828,626 learners
Questions answered by our learning community with help from expert French teachers
13,653 questions • 29,215 answers • 828,626 learners
Hi, I'm a beginner in French and I always get confused in using Je suis and J'ai. In my head (which thinks in English), sentences like 'I am 20 years old' is not 'Je suis vingt ans' but 'J'ai vingt ans' which literally means 'I have 20 years old'. Is there are hard rule when to use Je suis or J'ai in a sentence?
Can you give me some idea of the relative strength of these? I was showing an apartment (I'm a broker) and the French client used "j'adore" to refer to the countertops... which confused me. To an English speaker, "adore" seems like a cognate, but in English we generally wouldn't say "I adore these countertops" -- that would likely come across as either 1) over-the-top or 2) sarcastic.
Does "j'adore" better translate as "I really like" or "I think these are cool/great"? And is it equal in strength to "j'aime"?
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