Learn French: Il faut que tu aies un peu de patience avec un colocataire bruyant. - It is necessary that you have a little patience with a noisy flatmate.

Il faut que tu aies un peu de patience avec un colocataire bruyant.

It is necessary that you have a little patience with a noisy flatmate.

Breakdown of Il faut que tu aies un peu de patience avec un colocataire bruyant.

a / an (masculine)

you (informal singular)

Questions & Answers about Il faut que tu aies un peu de patience avec un colocataire bruyant.

Why does this sentence use aies instead of as?

Aies is the subjunctive form of avoir for tu. We have to use the subjunctive here because the sentence starts with il faut que (it is necessary that), which is one of the most common triggers for the subjunctive mood in French.

How do you pronounce aies in this sentence?

It is pronounced just like the French letter è (similar to the English vowel in "pet"). In the present subjunctive, the forms aie, aies, and ait all sound exactly the same!

Why is it un peu de patience and not un peu de la patience?

After expressions of quantity like un peu (a little), beaucoup (a lot), or trop (too much), you generally use a bare de or d'. You drop the definite article (le, la, or les) that you might normally use with the noun.

If the noisy flatmate were a woman, would colocataire change?

The spelling of colocataire stays exactly the same because it already ends in an -e. However, the words around it would change to match the feminine gender: une colocataire bruyante.