D’accord, pendant je fais mes devoirs, je suis tombée sur le verbe irrégulier «Suffire», et quel mot!
D’ailleurs il est un verbe irrégulier et j’ai besoin d’apprendre le conjugation, il était aussi très difficile de travailler si j’avais besoin d’employer « à » ou « de » avec cet verbe avant un infinitif.
Alors, j’ai cherché l’internet et j’ai trouvé le suivant dans un forum qui m’a aidé:
I’m no native speaker but as I understand it:
“Il suffit de faire x à faire y.” means “Doing x is enough in order to do y.”
So, in this case, x is “what you need to do” while y is “the expected result”. The ambiguity arises in the translation because in English it looks the same :
“You need to do this to do that.”
In fact, the first “to do” is an infinitive while the second “to do” means “in order to do”. That’s why “cela suffit à faire” in French can be replaced with “cela suffit pour faire”.
So in your examples:
“Un rien suffit à le mettre en colère.” is “Nothing at all is enough to set him off.”
(“setting him off” is the result. It’s not what needs to happen for the condition to be fulfilled, it’s what happens if the condition is fulfilled.)“Il suffit de me téléphoner.” is “You just have to call me.”
(“calling me” is all that needs to happen. What results from that is unstated.)“Le vin n’a pas suffit pour me réchauffer.” is “The wine wasn’t enough to warm me up.”
(In this last example, “warming me up” is the desired result of drinking wine.)Does that sound right, French natives?
Vous pouvez voir le post original ici.