difference between "assez" and "suffit"

Aloha, am fairly new to learning French. My grandmother is 100% French Canadian so I thought it would be awesome to be able to converse in her native language with her. I am having trouble with these two words. Can anyone explain the difference between them and when you would use each?

As in j'ai assez (I have enough) and il est suffit (he's enough)

I don't understand the difference. Merci!

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on September 22, 2014 at 9:48pm

If you're a very beginner, you can start by ignoring the word suffit, and pretending that the word for "enough" is assez. That'll get you started.

Then, the word suffit is actually a verb. In other words, it literally means "suffices". So ça suffit! literally means "that suffices!". But in reality, "suffice" is a fairly rare word in English, and instead you'd say "that's enough!". Or put another way, "... suffit" means something like "... is enough", "... is sufficient".

You'll commonly find it in at least two cases:

(1) The phrase already mentioned: ça suffit! = that's enough!

(2) The expression Il suffit de... means something like "All you need to do is...", "You can simply ... to do what you need".

Other than that, don't worry too much about the word suffit: there are more important things to learn first! For example, the form suffit comes from the verb suffire, which is quite an irregular verb. Really, I'd make sure that you're familiar with how regular verbs work and how more common irregular verbs work before moving on to verbs like suffire. (What you're trying to do is a bit like trying to learn English by starting with the verb "smite" :)

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Permalink Reply by terence studye on September 22, 2014 at 11:35pm

Hi Neil, mahalo for a quick response :) I finally figured out that suffit was a verb and assez was not but they seemed (at least in my mind) to be used interchangeably so that made it more confusing. I'm trying to learn via the Pimsleur method which, as you may know is almost all oral, and supplementing with whatever I can find elsewhere, mainly because I want to know how to spell those words I'm trying to pronounce! (I think it makes a huge difference if you can "see" what you're saying!) So I will take your advice and ignore "suffit" until if and when it comes up as an "ir" verb in my coursework and "pretend" that the word for 'enough' is assez. That helps lots. Many thanks!

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Permalink Reply by delhotal olivier on October 8, 2014 at 4:17pm

I am fed up j'en ai assez

Il est suffit doesn't exist!!!!

I have got enough problems j'ai assez de problemes

Il est suffisamment intelligent pour comprendre he is intelligent enough to understand....