Kilo Lingo

French · Chapter 4 · Lesson 15 · Grammar primer

Negation: ne... pas, jamais, rien, personne

How French wraps negation around the verb, the four core negative pairs, and the colloquial ne-drop you'll hear in spoken French.

The short version

Negate the verb and the article collapses

After a negative verb every indefinite and partitive article becomes plain de, or d' before a vowel. J'ai un chien turns into je n'ai pas de chien; je mange du pain into je ne mange pas de pain. The definite article does not budge, because it still points at a specific thing.

Je n'ai pas d'argent.

I don't have any money.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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Lesson 15 of 21 in this chapter

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