# EN: J'aurais préféré que tu me le dises



## ChirpingBird

Hi everyone,
I am trying to say "j'aurais préféré que tu me le dises".

A. Spontaneously I said "I would have preferred you telling me", is that correct and idiomatic?
B. Would that be good too : "I would have preferred that you told me"

How would you natives have put it?

Thanks so much,

CB


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## Maître Capello

Je dirais plutôt : _I would have preferred you to tell me_.

Ou sinon : _I'd rather you had told me._


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## moustic

In a real life situation, I would probably make a more direct complaint:
_I think you should've told me...
I wish you'd told me..._

(I know these aren't exactly equivalent).


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## ChirpingBird

Thanks Moustic,  idiomatic is what I was looking for, so that's perfect to me 👍


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## enattente

"I wish you would have told me." 

Or, if you want to insist on it being "you" as opposed to someone else:

"I wish it had been you who told me."


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## elroy

I would say: I would’ve rather you told me.


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## ChirpingBird

elroy said:


> I would say: I would’ve rather you told me.


Thanks a lot Elroy, it's kind of the closest to what I originally meant.

Sorry but two more questions about it :
1. I also read "I would have rather*ed* you told me", correct as well ?
2. What about that one: "I would have preferred you told me" ?

Thanks a lot for.your time,

CB


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## elroy

ChirpingBird said:


> 1. I also read "I would have rather*ed* you told me", correct as well ?


Where did you read it?  It sounds incorrect to me.  “rather” is not a verb.



ChirpingBird said:


> 2. What about that one: "I would have preferred you told me" ?


I would say “I would’ve preferred *it* if you *had* told me,” but that’s wordier than my suggestion.


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## ChirpingBird

Am I allowed to post links referring to external forums?
If yes, it's from Quora:



> For a native speaker, it's grammatically correct. I hear this construction in the US NE.
> I would have rathered you* gone and done the dishes. (Than whatever you actually did.)
> I would have rathered you* ate the pie, before your diabetic father came home.
> I would have rathered he* ate at noon…
> I would have rathered we* went for a walk



Is the phrase “I would have rathered…” grammatically correct? If yes, what are some example uses?

So that's all wrong? Or is it something we commonly say but is incorrect grammatically-wise? It happens in French too.

Ok for sentence number 2!


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## elroy

I’ve never heard it!  Perhaps it’s a regional or sociolectal variant.


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## moustic

Never heard "rathered" either.
It sounds very strange to me.


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## OLN

J'aurais plutôt fait confiance à cet intervenant



qu'à " Xuanzi Zerene (Еремей Сенько), Articulate English Speaker with linguistics background" , mais on trouve ceci en ligne sur la page sérieuse Verbal rather  | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. :


> "I wouldn’t tell him, but I would have rathered slept in a bed because, in all honesty, his lap was not very comfortable." (Wood 2013:59)​Verbal _rather_ is the use of the word _rather_ as a verb meaning ‘prefer,’ as in the following sentence:
> 1) _They would have *rathered* her go hang out at parties._ (Klippenstein 2012)​In (1), _rather_ takes the ending -_ed_, a suffix that is characteristic of verbs. As will be discussed further below, verbal _rather_ has, for many speakers, developed distinct linguistic properties which set it apart from perhaps all other verbs in the language.





> “The clearest pre-1900 example occurs in Sinclair’s (1899) edited version of the 1614 text given in (2b) above. Sinclair cleans up spelling, morphology , word choice, and style towards norms of his time. In the process, he adapts _I rather I had bene buried heir a _(without morphology) to _I should have rathered I had been buried here _(with morphology); this indicates that he in fact perceived _should have rathered_ as relatively standard.”


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## ChirpingBird

The rathered thing looks definitely like an American regional wording.

Thanks so much everyone, it's way more than I expeceted.

As for me, I'll stick to Elroy's!


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## LeifGoodwin

ChirpingBird said:


> Am I allowed to post links referring to external forums?
> If yes, it's from Quora:
> 
> 
> [snip]
> 
> So that's all wrong? Or is it something we commonly say but is incorrect grammatically-wise? It happens in French too.
> 
> Ok for sentence number 2!


I use Duolingo as part of my French studies, and honestly a significant proportion of the English is wrong to my ears. However, having discussed this online, it appears that in most cases they use Americanisms. For example “My car has no more battery” sounds awful and barely intelligible. Whether those Americanisms are correct American English I know not. I suggest you keep to standard English, avoiding anything that is too British or too American, unless you wish to adopt a given dialect.

I would say, as per Maître Capello, “I’d rather you had told me” or even “I wish you had told me” is probably more common in informal British English. “I would have preferred it had you told me”  sounds okay but a bit more formal.


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