Language/French/Grammar/se-as-an-alternative-to-an-English-passive
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se as an alternative to an English passive
se may be used with a verb as an alternative to an English passive:
- Un collant se lave en deux minutes
A pair of tights can be washed in two minutes
- Le Gamay se boit frais
Gamay (light red wine) is best drunk chilled
- L'uni se vend bien cet hiver
Plain colours are selling well this winter
This usage is restricted to special circumstances. The sentence must describe a state of affairs and not an action and the verb must not suggest through its tense that the action takes place in a limited time span.
Take some time to dive into these other pages after completing this lesson: Possessive determiners, Omission of the article, Indirect and Direct Transitive Verbs & Adverbs ending in —ment derived from words no longer in the language.
Other Lessons[edit | edit source]
- ensuite VS puis
- How to recognize when the start of a relative clause is a direct object
- An adjective agreeing with nouns linked by de
- Adjective—adjective compounds
- Gender of Nouns Names of ships and restaurants
- Indirectly transitive in French but directly transitive in English
- Gender of compound nouns
- Ordinal numbers
- Plurals of nouns ending in –al
- Direct object and indirect object pronouns differences between English and French
- Use of the definite article to indicate a habitual action
- Gender
- Colour adjective compounds
- Subject verb agreement — Agreement with more than one subject linked by “et”