Breakdown of La justice est importante dans notre pays.
Questions & Answers about La justice est importante dans notre pays.
In French, abstract ideas (like la justice, la liberté, l’amour) almost always take the definite article (le / la / l’) when you talk about them in a general sense.
- La justice est importante. = Justice is important. (in general)
- La liberté est essentielle. = Freedom is essential.
Leaving out the article (Justice est importante) is not correct in standard French in this kind of sentence. French simply uses the article more than English does.
Justice is a feminine noun: la justice.
There is no reliable rule that will tell you the gender of every word. You mostly have to learn each noun together with its article:
- la justice (feminine)
- le pouvoir (masculine)
- la liberté (feminine)
- le droit (masculine, “law”)
Some endings tend to be feminine, and nouns ending in -ice (like justice, police, notice) are often feminine, but this is only a tendency, not a guarantee. The important thing is to memorize la justice as a unit.
Adjectives in French agree in gender and number with the noun they describe.
- Noun: la justice → feminine singular
- Adjective: important has 4 forms:
- masculine singular: important
- feminine singular: importante
- masculine plural: importants
- feminine plural: importantes
So, with la justice you must use the feminine singular form:
- La justice est importante. ✅
- La justice est important. ❌ (wrong agreement)
Both are correct, but they are used slightly differently:
La justice est importante.
You are clearly talking about justice as the subject. It is specific and explicit.C’est important.
This means That’s important or It’s important. The subject is vague: what is important is understood from context, but not stated grammatically.
If someone asks: Tu penses que la justice est importante ?
You could simply answer: Oui, c’est important.
So La justice est importante is a full statement about justice; C’est important is more generic and depends on context.
For “in our country”, French normally uses dans or en, but they are not interchangeable in every context.
- dans notre pays ⇒ literally “inside our country,” but in practice it just means in our country.
- en is used with countries: en France, en Espagne, en Allemagne.
With the word pays itself, dans notre pays is the standard, natural expression here:
- La justice est importante dans notre pays. ✅
- La justice est importante en notre pays. ❌ (archaic/unnatural today)
- La justice est importante à notre pays. ❌ (wrong preposition)
So: dans + notre pays is what you should use.
Yes, there’s a nuance:
- en France talks about a specific country by name.
- dans notre pays emphasizes the inside/within aspect of the community we belong to.
For example:
- La justice est importante dans notre pays.
Sounds like a general statement about the society we live in. - La justice est importante en France.
Names France explicitly and may sound slightly more factual or specific.
Both mean in our country, but dans notre pays focuses more on within our national community.
Notre and nos both mean our, but:
- notre is used before singular nouns (both masculine and feminine):
- notre pays (our country)
- notre maison (our house)
- nos is used before plural nouns:
- nos pays (our countries)
- nos maisons (our houses)
Since pays is singular in meaning here (one country), we say:
- notre pays ✅
- nos pays ❌ (would mean “our countries”)
Pays is one of those French nouns that ends in -s in both the singular and the plural.
- Singular: un pays – notre pays
- Plural: des pays – nos pays
In your sentence, notre pays (with notre) shows that pays is singular.
Also, pays is masculine: le pays, un pays, ce pays.
Approximate pronunciations (using English-like hints):
- la → la (like “lah”)
- justice → zhoo-steess
- j like the s in measure
- final e is pronounced: jus-ti-ce (3 syllables)
- est → eh (same vowel as père in French; the t is usually silent)
- importante → ɛ̃-por-tant (nasal an at the end; final e is silent in normal speech)
- dans → dɑ̃ (nasal an sound, roughly like “dahn” with the n nasal, not fully pronounced)
- notre → no-tr (very light or almost no vowel on the second syllable)
- pays → pé-i (two syllables: pé
- i)
So the whole sentence sounds roughly like:
la zhoo-steess ɛt‿ɛ̃-por-tant dɑ̃ no-tr pé-i
Yes, there is a common liaison:
- est importante → [ɛt‿ɛ̃pɔrtɑ̃t]
You pronounce the normally silent t of est and link it to importante.
Elsewhere, you would not usually make liaisons here in everyday speech:
- justice est → often no liaison (you can say jus-tice‿est, but many speakers don’t).
- importante dans → no liaison.
- dans notre → no liaison.
The main one to pay attention to is est importante.
Yes, absolutely. Both are correct and natural:
- La justice est importante dans notre pays.
- Dans notre pays, la justice est importante.
Putting Dans notre pays at the beginning just emphasizes in our country more strongly, as a topic: As for our country, justice is important.
They are related but not the same:
la justice
- The idea of justice, fairness, what is morally or socially just.
- Also the justice system (courts, judges) in some contexts:
- La justice est lente. = The justice system is slow.
le droit
- Law as a system of rules or as a field of study:
- étudier le droit = to study law
- le droit français = French law
- Law as a system of rules or as a field of study:
So in your sentence:
- La justice est importante dans notre pays.
= Justice / fairness (and possibly the justice system) is important in our country.
If you said Le droit est important dans notre pays, you would be stressing the system of laws or legal rights, not the more general idea of justice.