• Resol van Lemmy@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’ll help you.

    The word “machine” in French is… “machine”, yeah it’s spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it’s feminine, which gives you “une machine”.

    Washing in French is “laver”. In French, there’s this thing called “complément de nom”, where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).

    In the case of this word, you’d use the preposition “à”. You will end up with “une machine à laver”, which translates literally to “a machine to wash”.

    Yeah, languages are complicated.