My so-so French skills make me want to turn “thinking of you” into “pensée à tu” (the familiar “you” is deliberate), but am I correct? Should I use some variant of “you are in my thoughts” (“tu es dans mes pensées”) instead? Or is there another phrase that is used to mean this between friends, but isn’t a word-for-word translation?
FWIW, I use this phrase to close e-mails to one particular friend; I’ve been using it for years, and figured it might be time to find out if I’m making up my own French phrases!
Minor nitpick, which might not even be right: if you’re going to use the informal second person pronoun, shouldn’t it be “toi” in this case, since it functions as the object of a preposition here?
No kidding. Computer programs are nowhere near sophisticated enough yet to produce accurate translations. Babelfish is a transliteration tool and should not be confused with a real translator. It’s there to help you get the gyst of a website, not translate into grammatically correct and idiomatic target languages.
So there’s no colloquial French equivalent to “thinking of…,” it’s just “thoughts of…?”
Er, I didn’t. “Pensée à tu” came out of my own little brain, and it surprised me to see PinGear’s internet translation (and also convinced me a little more that I might have been presuming incorrectly). Besides, if I were going to trust Bablefish (or apps of its ilk) I wouldn’t have asked a question here, right?
Hmm, I think I like that even better than my “pensées/pensée” attempts.
Just to confirm that pulykamell’s "je pense à toi " is good. “Pensée à tu” (or toi) doesn’t mean anything - pensée is a noun (or past participle) meaning “thought”, à toi after a noun indicates possession - the thought belongs to you…
I used to be almost completely bilingual and although I have lost much of my french due to disuse I would say that “Je pense a toi/Je pense a vous” would be perfectly acceptable. Or, you could even say “tu es dans mes pensees/vous etes dans mes pensees”. Sorry, I don’t know how to work the accents on this machine.
Slight hijack, but a little bit related: I always found it interesting that to say “I miss you” in french, you say “tu me manques”. Seems wrong. Always sounded friggin egotistical to me, but it’s true!
Yes, strictly, you could. However, I wouldn’t use this construction to translate the English “thinking of you.” You’d use a gerund in the following manner: Pensant à toi, j’ai acheté ces fleurs. (I bought those flowers thinking of you.)
By itself, “pensant à toi” is incomplete. You’d get the idea accross, but if you want to be nitpicky about style, “je pense à toi” is better.
But you could say the same thing about English. “Thinking of you” is an incomplete English phrase, but anyone fluent in English would recognize that the “I am” is implied. I thought the OP was asking about common usage and not necessarily forming 100% gramatically complete sentences. Would a French speaker hear “pensant à toi” as a meaningless phrase that sounds “off” in casual usage? I think in English, anyway, the complete-sentence version sounds stilted and actually a little stalkerish.
Not in French, though. I’ll try to rationalise it this way: “Pensant à toi” sounds odd by itself at the end of a letter because you’d expect it to begin a thought, not end one.
Also, “thinking of you” can be a gerund, but in the context in question, it’s a contracted form of “(I’m) thinking of you.” In French, the two forms (pensant/pense) are different. In French, the presence of the pronouns is not optional. Dropping the first person pronoun results in an imperative: “pense à toi” actually means “think about yourself.”
Another similar way you could sign of a letter would be this:
It’s good but a bit old-fashioned. I don’t think many people would use that phrase anymore. Rephrasing it in the familiar: “Tu es toujours dans mes pensées”, works but is actually quite strong. You wouldn’t use it unless you were really fond of the person.
