Here’s another example sentence taken from 1000, which has 1000 examples of things you can hear people say in French conversations in Québec:
C’est n’importe quoi!
That’s nonsense! Whatever!
This expression isn’t limited to the French of Québec.
It can also be shortened to just:
N’importe quoi!
Nonsense!
The final e of n’importe is pronounced, so n’importe has three syllables (n’im/por/te).
Tu dis n’importe quoi.
You’re saying nonsense.
Écoute-les pas, i’ disent n’importe quoi.
Don’t listen to them, they’re saying nonsense.
You’ll remember that the Québécois pronounce the letter d like dz before the French i sound, so disent from the example above sounds like dziz.
If you want to make your French sound more Québécois, you’ll definitely want to adopt this dz sound. It’s described in the 1000 PDF along with all the example sentences. You can buy it here.
Oops! I’ve been saying this to mean “it doesn’t matter.” As in: “Est-ce que tu veut celui-ci ou celui-là?” “N’importe quoi!”
I guess I’ll add this to my list of embarrassing mistakes that I won’t make again. 🙂
We’ve all got a list like that. I think you want n’importe lequel or l’un ou l’autre.
Hi Felix. I assume that the n’ is not pronounced in C’est n’importe quoi!. Does this mean that liaison allows the t to be pronounced in C’est?
The n’ is pronounced. Ne drops informally in ne… pas constructions, but this n’ has to stay because we’re dealing with something else here. If you drop the n’ here, the expression won’t be understood.
Hi Felix,
There’s something I’m a little confused about. You’ve used this as an example: “Écoute-les pas, i’ disent n’importe quoi.” Should it be “y-disent n’imports quoi.” The “i-disent” has me scratching my head a bit. Can you explain this?
Thanks
PS. For Mark: Someone I know had people falling over laughing because he described his former girlfriend as “ma vielle blonde”, assuming it meant the same thing as “my old girlfriend” would in English. He didn’t know that there’s a distinction in French between “ancienne” (former) and vielle (old). Actually, I’m glad that I found out about it because I could have easily been making the same mistake.
The i’ that I’ve used above is an informal pronunciation of ils, where only the initial vowel sound is pronounced (the final L sound isn’t heard). This pronunciation is often written y and that’s also how I usually write it on the blog, but I chose to use i’ instead this time.