Breakdown of J'avoue que j'ai perdu sa confiance.
je
I
avoir
to have
son
his/her/its
perdre
to lose
que
that (introducing a clause)
avouer
to confess
la confiance
the trust
Questions & Answers about J'avoue que j'ai perdu sa confiance.
Why is it sa confiance if the sentence means 'his' trust? Shouldn't it use a masculine word?
In French, possessive adjectives match the gender of the thing being owned, not the person who owns it. The word confiance is a feminine noun, so it takes the feminine adjective sa.
Since sa matches the feminine word confiance, how do we know it means 'his' trust and not 'her' trust?
This lesson is about indirect object pronouns (lui and leur). Could we use lui here to say we lost trust 'to him'?
No, we can't. It is tempting to try and use lui here, but the verb perdre (to lose) does not use an indirect object pronoun to show whose trust was lost. Instead, you just state what was lost as a direct object using a possessive adjective: sa confiance (his trust).
Can I drop the word que like we often drop 'that' in English?
No, you cannot. In English, it is perfectly fine to say 'I confess I lost his trust.' However, in French, the conjunction que (that) is strictly required to connect the two parts of the sentence and can never be left out.
Is j'ai perdu the passé composé tense?
Yes! It is the passé composé of the verb perdre (to lose). It is formed with the present tense of the helping verb avoir (j'ai) and the past participle of perdre, which is perdu.
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