Marie choisit l’emplacement de la bouture.

In normal everyday reading, choisit is the present tense of choisir, third person singular: Marie choisit = Marie chooses / is choosing.

One small complication: choisit can also be the passé simple form of choisir in literary French, meaning Marie chose. But unless the context is clearly literary or historical, learners should usually understand it here as the present.

Because emplacement begins with a vowel. In French, le and la usually drop their final vowel before a word that starts with a vowel or a silent h:

• le + emplacement → l’emplacement
• la + école → l’école

This is called elision.

Emplacement is masculine.

That is not obvious from l’emplacement, because l’ can stand for either le or la. A good way to check the gender is to look at another determiner:

• un emplacement
• cet emplacement

Those forms show clearly that it is masculine.

Because bouture is a feminine noun.

After de, the definite articles work like this:

• de + le → du
• de + la → de la
• de + l’ → de l’
• de + les → des

So:

• de la bouture is correct because bouture is feminine.
• du bouture would be wrong.

Here de links the two nouns.

Literally, l’emplacement de la bouture looks like the location of the cutting, but in natural English it may also be understood as the place for the cutting or the cutting’s location.

French uses de very often in places where English might use:

• of
• for
• a possessive structure, like the cutting’s

Both words can refer to a place, but emplacement often sounds more like a specific spot, site, or location, especially one chosen for something.

So in a gardening context, l’emplacement de la bouture suggests the exact spot where the cutting will go. It sounds a bit more precise than simply la place.

Bouture is a gardening word. It means a cutting: a piece of a plant used to grow a new plant.

So this is not just any kind of cut piece in general. It is specifically a plant cutting in a horticultural sense.

Because Marie is a proper name. In standard French, first names normally appear without an article:

• Marie choisit...
• Paul arrive...

In some regional or informal varieties of French, people sometimes say things like la Marie, but that is not the neutral standard form learners should use first.

No. In this sentence, you need a conjugated verb, and choisit is the correct verb form.

Choisie is usually the feminine past participle or an adjective:

• la bouture choisie = the chosen cutting

But after the subject Marie, you need the verb choisit, not choisie.

A rough English-style approximation is:

ma-REE shwa-ZEE lam-plass-MAHN duh la boo-TYOOR

A more accurate phonetic version is:

/ma.ʁi ʃwa.zi lɑ̃.pla.sə.mɑ̃ də la bu.tyʁ/

A few useful pronunciation points:

• choisit: the final t is silent
• l’emplacement: the en/an sound is nasal
• bouture: the u is the French u, not the English oo
• the French r is different from the English r