French · Chapter 1 · Lesson 15 · Grammar primer
Negation
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
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.
Pas encore answers a déjà question
When someone asks tu as déjà mangé? (have you already eaten?), the honest negative is non, pas encore - not yet. It's built on the ordinary ne... pas sandwich with encore simply added after pas, and in the passé composé it sits between the auxiliary and the participle, exactly where plain pas goes.
je n'ai pas encore fini
Pas encore and plus point opposite ways
Ne... pas encore waits for something that hasn't started; ne... plus marks something that has already stopped. Je ne fume pas encore oddly implies you're about to start smoking - the sentence you want for quitting is je ne fume plus.
je ne fume plus
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.
Read the full article · 5 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 34 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 15 of 18 in this chapter