Y = There (adverbial pronoun)

Hi Rob,

Are you talking about a specific quiz?

 

It's simply because the lesson is about the pronoun "y". You're supposed to practice its use. 

-- Chris. 

In general, you are doing something very tempting when learning a foreign language, but something you can never do: you can never take an English sentence, translate each word with a dictionary, and end up with a correct foreign-language sentence. That's just not how grammar works. Foreign languages not only have different lists of words--they have different ways of putting words together into sentences.

There is a famous book where someone tried to go the other way: he took French sentences and looked up the matching English words in a dictionary. The results were pretty comical:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_As_She_Is_Spoke

Bonjour Susan ! You will never use both "y" and "en" together in the same sentence. In such a case, you will use either "en" or "y" to replace one of the groups, and keep the original other group. "Je veux des bonbons à la plage." (I want sweets at the beach.) -> "J'y veux des bonbons." (Not my favourite option, it doesn't sound great to my French ears!) -> "J'en veux à la plage." I hope that's helpful! À bientôt !

"You will never use both "y" and "en" together in the same sentence." - I often hear the phrase "Y en a." in response to a question like "Il y a des pommes dans ce magasin?", for example. Is it then wrong to use "y" and "en" together in the above sentence?

Bonjour J, Yes, y can replace any preposition* that indicates a place: à, sur, dans, chez. *Except de, which is replaced by en.

Thanks, Laura. I think I'm clear on this, but is there a reason you single out "à + a place" in the lesson? Thanks.

Good point, I'll pass this on to Aurélie so she can add some other examples.

Bonjour John ! The lesson has now been updated with new examples of cases with "sur, chez, dans". Merci et à bientôt !

Bonjour Dipika !

Technically, this sentence "J'y peux venir ce soir" is correct to say "I can come there tonight".
However, no one French would actually use this formulation.

We'd rather say:
Je peux venir ce soir.   or
Je peux venir ici (here)/là (there)/là-bas (over there) ce soir.

I hope that's helpful!

Bonjour Diane,

Y precedes the verb it modifies, which is réfléchir. Putting y in front of vais would be like saying "I'm going about it to think."

Oh! Didn't know that. Merci!