use of un v de

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EducatorPermalink Reply by George Hunt on January 3, 2016 at 6:45pm

I am a bit confused .

I am fairly confident "je ne vais pas faire un apprentissage" is correct but I am not sure about  "je ne vais pas faire d'apprentissage"

I think it may be alright  but ,as I say I am a little confused

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Permalink Reply by Robert on January 4, 2016 at 1:22am

You probably have in mind something like you will skip over some training program. If so, that's not the way to say it.

"Faire l'apprentissage de..." is a set construction for 'Acquire knowledge of some sort.' And it doesn't go with the negative form.

Another problem is that "d'apprentissage" is never a partitive form as you apparently want it to be. Instead, it is used in the adjectival role, such as in : Source d'apprentissage, École d'apprentissage, etc.

I hope someone else will jump in with comments here.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra on January 4, 2016 at 3:15pm

Robert is right, but we can use both of them in common language.

"apprentissage" is the name of a special way of learning a profession. I don"t know if it's an abusive use of a word that is not supposed to be used as a name given its form, but we do.

"apprentissage" is a program where you spend 2 days at work and 3 days at school and win a small salary,  usually used by people under 18. A student in "apprentissage" is called "un apprenti".

So, grammatically speaking both are wrong because "apprentissage" should not be used like that....

But in my experience I'll go with "Je ne vais pas faire d'apprentissage". As a native speaker, this phrase makes perfect sens to me, I understand you will not go with that special form of study.

"Je ne vais pas faire un apprentissage" is also correct but less nice to the ears...  because of the two "hard" sounds of "un" + "app.." too close from each other...

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