en

en in french means in,to any other is there? plz tell me in this phrase 1-combien des enfants avez vous? ans- j'en ai un. why en is here? plz explain.thx ...................thx frank for helping me and for clearing all my doubts.............plz explain if there any other meanings of en...

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 7, 2009 at 8:18pm

To get you started, you can imagine "en" as meaning "of them". So when you say J'en ai trois, you're literally saying I have three of them. However, it turns out that in French, the en is obligatory: it's not grammatical in French to just say ~~J'ai un~~, ~~J'ai beaucoup.~~ etc-- you need the en.

So why does French do this? Well, to some extent, it "just does". Both Italian and Spanish are essentially variants of the same language, and Italian has also kept the en (as I recall, it's actually ne in Italian), whereas Spanish doesn't have it (you can just say tengo uno, tengo muchos etc).

The word en can essentially stand in for most of the uses of de. For example:

Il est sorti de prison
He came out of prison
Il en est sorti
He came out (of prison)

Il parle beuacoup de ses enfants
He speaks a lot about his children
Il en parle beaucoup
He speaks a lot about them

Il a l'air d'être content
He looks happy
Il en a l'air
He looks it

By the way, be careful of your very first sentence (Combien d'enfants...?).

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Permalink Reply by shagun on September 8, 2009 at 4:33pm

thx neil ...... i got it now ....... but in my first sentence as enfants is pluriel so des is incorrect? why?help

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Permalink Reply by Frank on September 8, 2009 at 4:45pm

"How many" is "Combien de" (if what follows is a consonant) and "Combien d'" (if what follows is a voyel) and you don't need to add anything like "des", "un", "le" or "la" afterwards.