Quantity — beaucoup de and its family

In one line

After any quantity word, only de follows — no le, no la, no des.

The forms on this page

The table

One place French is simpler than English. English makes you choose between much and many, less and fewer, how much and how many, according to whether the noun is countable. French uses one word for both: beaucoup de livres and beaucoup de temps, moins de gens and moins de bruit. There is no French equivalent of the less/fewer argument.

And the same for units:

Why the article drops

Without a quantity word, an uncountable noun takes the partitive article:

And the same with a countable noun:

The rule underneath: du and des already contain a de. The quantity word wants a de as well. French will not put two de in a row, so only one survives.

Exceptions — three places where de does not stand alone

That last one is a fine distinction:

English draws exactly this line with "of the". "A lot of students" is general; "a lot of the students" picks from a known group. French: de alone for the first, des / du for the second.

peu and un peu — one word that reverses the meaning

English has precisely the same pair, and it turns on the same tiny word: "I have a little time" (some) versus "I have little time" (not enough); "a few friends" versus "few friends". The French un is doing the job of the English a. So this section, which is genuinely hard for speakers of many other languages, is free for you.

And un peu de only goes with uncountable nouns. For countable ones use quelques: quelques amis, not un peu d'amis.

Quantity as an adverb, with no noun

The same words, without de, attach to the verb:

de appears only when a noun follows.

Examples

Common mistakes

Where the de after a quantity came from