English Translation
Do you still want me to give Tom your old computer?
I think this is supposed to be ordinateur ancien to mean old computer. Ancien ordinateur means former computer.
Hi @corgwin24,
To know how to translate the English sentence into French, I need to answer this question:
Is “old” in the English sentence used to mean ‘that has existed for a long time’ or ‘previous / previously owned/used’ ?
In French, If I want to describe a computer and say that it is old, I can say:
1.C’est un vieil ordinateur. → This is an old computer.
if I bought a new computer and I gave the one I no longer use to Tom, I would say:
2.J’ai donné mon ancien ordinateur à Tom. → I gave my “old” computer to Tom.
(Was the computer I gave to Tom actually old? Not necessarily. The point is that I was no longer using it .)
If you really mean old (as in you bought it X years ago), then you should use “vieil”:
Veux-tu toujours que je donne ton vieil ordinateur à Tom ?
We would use “vieil” and not “vieux” here, for phonetic reasons.
And in : “Veux-tu toujours que je donne ton ancien ordinateur à Tom ?”,
"ancien" is pronounced “ancienne”, as if it was feminine. Again, phonetics.
We would not say “ordinateur ancien”, it does not sound right.
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Thank you, that helps.
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