Richard Good
It’s the smallest words that sometimes present the biggest challenge. Compare these two sentences:
Je suis prêt à partir. Je suis pressé de rentrer.
I’m ready to leave. I’m in a hurry to get home.
They have the same structure. Both are translated in English by the infinitive: “to leave / to get home”.
But in the first case the preposition is à, while in the second case it’s de.
Direct translation of words like de and à doesn’t work: there is no direct correlation between French and English. We’re going to have to find a different way in.
Choosing a strategy
There are different ways to go about this.
A first strategy is to learn by imitation just as a child might do. Reading out loud is a good exercise for this: you develop the right habits as automatic reflexes.
A second strategy is to learn by memorisation. Take a list of adjectives and verbs that are followed by de, and a list of adjectives and verbs that are followed by à. Convert them into flashcards and keep testing yourself until you’re confident.
A third approach is to create mental spaces that correspond to the French words. We can try to do this with de and à for example.
There are more than 30 very common French verbs which are followed by de:
accepter de, essayer de, permettre de, persuader de, suggérer de…
And another 30 or so that are followed by à:
aider à, autoriser à, contraindre à, renoncer à, réussir à…
To find a pattern, we can think of other situations in which de and à are used. The preposition à is used for physical destinations:
Je vais à Paris.
and the verbs that are followed by à are similarly focused on the destination of the construction :
Il m’a aidée à monter l’escalier.
J’ai appris à nager.
Je renonce à me présenter.
J’hésite à appeler.
The preposition de is used to denote origins:
Je viens de Lyon.
And de is also the word we use to categorise nouns: un carnet d’adresses, un permis de conduire.
We can think of verbs followed by de in the same way:
Je refuse de signer ce document.
I refuse something. What do I refuse? To sign a document. The focus is on the first verb. What follows is its qualification.
So the mental boxes for the verbs that take de and à can be summarised as:
à – a forward projection to the action described in the verb that follows
de – a description of a mental state or process, qualified by the verb that follows
And we can see the same classification can be applied to adjectives. Returning to the two sentences that began this article:
Je suis prêt à partir. Je suis pressé de rentrer.
Prêt projects forward to the action that follows: it is followed by à.
Pressé describes our state of mind and then qualifies that description with additional detail: it is followed by de.
Conclusion
Creating mental boxes in this way can be a helpful complement to the organic process of learning by doing: they provide a home for your memory. If you keep reading, listening, noticing and absorbing, over time the right reflexes become automatic.
