Breakdown of Tu devrais respecter les coutumes du pays.
tu
you (informal singular)
le pays
the country
du
of the / from the (masculine singular, with plural des)
devoir
to have to / must
le
him, it (masculine direct object pronoun)
respecter
to respect
la coutume
the custom
Questions & Answers about Tu devrais respecter les coutumes du pays.
Why use Tu devrais instead of Tu dois?
Tu dois is the present tense, meaning "you must" or "you have to" — it expresses a strict rule or obligation. Tu devrais is the conditional form, which softens the statement to mean "you should". This makes it the perfect, polite way to give advice or a recommendation in French.
Why isn't the verb respecter conjugated here?
When a conjugated verb like devrais is directly followed by a second verb, that second verb stays in its infinitive (unconjugated dictionary) form. It works a lot like English: you say "you should respect" (not "you should respects").
Why does it say du pays instead of de le pays?
Why does pays have an 's' at the end if we are only talking about one country?
The word pays naturally ends in an 's' even in its singular form (un pays). Because it already ends in an 's', it doesn't change in the plural, meaning "the countries" is just les pays. In this sentence, the singular contraction du tells us we are talking about exactly one country.
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