Most of the time, French adverbial expressions of quantity are followed by DE (or D’ when the word begins with a vowel), even when the noun that follows is plural. You may feel tempted to use DES – DE LA – DU – DE L’ after these expressions, but the change to DE is necessary. Expressions of quantity represent just one instance in French when DE is required.
👉 Tu vas boire combien de jus?
👉 How much juice are you going to drink?
* EXCEPTION* The definite articles LE – LA – LES may be used with these expressions to indicate the quantity of a specific item. Remember that DE LE = DU, and DE LES = DES.
👉 Ils ont bu pas mal du jus que j’ai acheté.
👉 They drank a good bit of the juice that I bought.
THE PRONOUN “EN”: Since all of these expressions indicate quantity, and they are followed by de, you can simply replace DE + NOUN with the pronoun EN.
👉 Est-ce que tu as assez de boissons? / Do you have enough drinks?
👉 Est-ce que tu en as assez? / Do you have enough (of them)?
Click here for a lesson on the different ways to use DE,
and get your list of expressions of quantity for weight and volume here.
Here’s a list of common French adverbial expressions of quantity:
Practice and master them with this QUIZLET study set
assez de | enough |
autant de | as many |
beaucoup de | a lot |
combien de | how many / how much |
la majorité de* | the majority |
la minorité de* | the minority |
moins de | less |
pas mal de | quite a few / a good bit |
un peu de | a little |
peu de | few |
plein de | full of / a lot of |
la plupart de* | the most |
plus de | more |
tant de | so many |
un tas de | a bunch |
tellement de | so many |
trop de | too many |
French Weights and Volumes
There are many other ways to express quantities such as weight and volume. You’ll find that many of these are used with food and drinks. Click here for a long list of ways to express these types of quantities.
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