Before doing this exercise, we recommend reviewing the preposition exercise or at least understand the prepositions à and de.

En and Y are called adverbial pronouns or pronominal adverbs.  Their names are not as important as to how you will see them on the exam, and they do appear on the exam and are worth 1-3 points.  We will expose their most common usage here.

As a general rule en in this usage does not mean “in” but replaces de followed by a noun after a verb that uses de.  Likewise, y replaces the preposition à and a noun.  We can use them to replace words such as locations and nouns that follow prepositions.

Y

Here are some examples:

Are you going to the store?

Yes, I am going there.

Becomes

Tu vas au magasin ?

Oui, j’y vais.

Note how the y follows the subject je and because there are two vowels, the e in je is dropped in favor of an apostrophe.  Notice how the y replaces “to the store” or “au magasin”.

Here is another example:

She thinks about our trip.

She thinks about it.

Elle pense à notre voyage.

Elle y pense.

The à changes to y to replace à notre voyage.

An easy way to think about it is if you are replacing part of the phrase and there is a preposition à there, switch it to y and shorten the phrase.  The one instance where you don’t make this change is if there are two verbs together such as “Je continue à lire”—you can’t replace à lire with y, it can only replace a noun used after à.

En

En is used in the following situations that are likely to be found on the test.  There are other uses, but we will just focus on these ones:

1. To replace de+noun with the word it or from it.  The bus left the station/It left on time.  Le bus est parti de la gare/Il en est parti à l’heure.
2. To replace un, une, du, de la, de l’, des+noun. My friend wants a coffee, but his wife doesn’t want any.  Mon ami veut du café mais sa femme n’en veut pas.
3. To say “of them”.  I bought two books/I bought two of them. J’ai acheté deux livres/ J’en ai acheté deux.

Note where the en is placed when using negation.

Select the correct response to the following questions.