á la, the use of de, and nouns

Hello! Last semester I had French 211, where we were assigned Compositions (usually a few pages of simple sentences). This semester I am taking French 212 - my first French course that is all new! Unfortunately, the summer was terrible for my memory. We were assigned Compositions again, and this particular assignment had us writing an entire paragraph describing ourselves. There are a few mistakes I made, but cannot figure out why they're wrong - they seem like they're right to me! Any help would be wonderful, thank you!

-Mon principal trait de caractére est la extraverite. Malheursement, mon défaut principal est la têtue, ce qui pose parfois...

The professor underlined the two bolded words - am I using the adjectif when I should be using the nouns? If so, why? In descriptions, do we not use adjectives?

-J'adore la musique, et je danse à la musique de Flamenco.

I used the preposition incorrectly - how? is it just Je danse la musique de Flamenco, or je danse de la musique de Flamenco? I'll admit, I've ALWAYS had a problem with the use of à :(

-J'aime manger __ bonne cuisine......c'est la cuisine de France ou _ Afrique.

I believe what my professor marked off was that I forgot the use of de, as in: j'aime manger de la bonne cuisine....c'est la cuisine de France ou d'Afrique. I use "de la" before "bonne cuisine" because it's feminine, correct?

-Une journée, l'endroit ou je voudrais aller en vacances est les plages de Vietnam!

I thought that this read "the beaches of Vietnam," why would the de be underlined as if it were wrong?

Thank you so much in advance! Also, if anyone could point me to a site with thorough explanations of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in French, that would be wonderful. For some reason, our professor is confusing the entire class (even the examples from the text are wrong, apparently!).

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 5, 2011 at 1:46pm

In the first case, you need nouns. Remember that the association "noun = naming word", "adjective = describing word" etc is just a rough approximation that works some of the time; it's not a reliable syntactic definition and it doesn't mean that EVERY single time you describe something, it will use an adjective 100% of the time-- you can only use an adjective where the sentence structure allows it. (Or think of it another way, you've probably learnt that "verbs are action words", but if I say "His departure was unexpected", the word 'departure' describes an action, but it's clearly a noun and not a verb since, for example, it's introduced by 'his', isn't marked for tense, would be itself modified by an adjective not an adverb-- "his slow departure" vs "he slowly departed"-- etc.)

In this case, the actual structural logic of your sentence demands a noun, so something like:

Mon trait de caractère principal est l'extraversion.

If you want to use an adjective, then you need to add a clause so that the adjective has "somewhere to go" in the sentence, e.g.:

Mon trait de caractère principal est que je suis extravertie.

In the second case, you can actually simplify it and just say je danse le flamenco (or "du flamenco" -- I think either would work here). Why? Well, basically because that's how it is -- whether and which preposition is used with a particular verb is largely a matter of habit (just as in other languages). So it's generally advisable to look the verb up in a dictionary to find out what structures are used.

As you rightly guessed, you practically always need some article or other ("un", "le", "du"...) before a noun-- you can't just use a "bare" noun as in English, Spanish etc. So in this case you would indeed say "de la bonne cuisine".

The second mistake is a little trickier, but has to do with a special property of the preposition "de", that it can't usually apply to more than one noun. So you need to repeat it and say "...de France ou d'Afrique". As I say, this is a special property of "de". With most other prepositions, you don't need to repeat, e.g. "pour la France et l'Afrique" = "for France and Africa". The prepositions "à" and "en" generally behave like "de" and need repetition, whereas other prepositions generally don't.

The last one is also tricky. You've probably learnt that in general, you need to use the article before country names. So you would generally say "La France", "Le Canada", "Le Viêt Nam" etc. BUT, when preceded by "de", it's common to omit the article (as you did with "France" and "Afrique") with a FEMININE country. But with a masculine country, the article is retained, so that you end up with "du Viêt Nam". Again, I can't really offer much of a logical explanation for this-- it's "just the way it is"...!

Unfortunately, these are really corner cases that come with practice. It's not clear to me that you have a problem with nouns, adjectives etc in general-- you just need to keep practising these more tricky cases.