"Il montre une vache." Duolingo, what?
@dconley Montre, pas monte! :p
("shows", not "rides"! :D )
@Louvelune But what is he showing the cow? Riding it makes more sense! (unless it's "he is showing off the cow", like to others?)
@dconley It's either "pointing towards" the cow, like a kid passing by the pastures, or "presenting it", like to a fair, or to sell it, or whatever... :<
@Louvelune okay. that makes sense. I thought it was "hey cow look at my Pokemon cards"
@dconley In French, that would be the INDIRECT object - "showing TO the cow": "montrer À la vache", whereas here the cow was the DIRECT object (what is being shown).
@dconley I'm not being very clear, but here's a better designed explanation of direct objects:
https://witches.town/@candle/887378
And so, INDIRECT objects (COI in French, for "complément d'objet indirect") will usually be indicated by a preposition (unless they're hidden in a pronoun because we're very twisted with our pronouns), to inform you they're not the CoD (the direct object). It's a bit technical, like all French grammar, but quite useful. :<
@Louvelune Thanks! Duolingo tried to explain that but didn't do it very well.
@dconley And (sorry for the looong posts, but grammar is quite verbose :p) I used "element" rather than "noun" because it can be a pronoun, or a full "groupe nominal" (determinant le/la/les + adjective + noun), the whole thing is considered one grammatical entity.
I'm done, this time. I think. :p
@Louvelune Don't apologize! This is all very helpful.
I didn't expect to be learning English grammar while learning French!
@dconley @Louvelune Learning a new language is really great to improve the comprehension of your own language 😁
I learn my French grammar during my latin's learning
@dconley Well, that's what I was saying a few days ago: the problem with English, is you don't need to learn formal grammar to learn it, at school.
So when comes the time to learn foreign languages, you're missing some essential tools to understand mechanisms, it slows you down a lot to catch up on us there - we had to learn all that in order to use & understand *our own* language, since early school years...
@dconley The most succinct way I can put it for identification in a sentence, is: "is the verb applied to the thing" (COD), or not (COI).
So, "I gave my sister the gift" => what is *being given*? => "the gift". That's the direct object, what the verb acts upon.
NB: In German, you'd use the Accusative case for it.
The indirect object would be the other element relevant to the verb's action, in this example the sister.
That's what German uses Dative case for.
And there is the "complément du nom", that German puts in Genitive case, for when the noun element you're considering relates to *another noun* and not to the verb.