/sɛ dy ɡato/ lit. ‘it’s cake’
French idiom, familiar. Something is very easy to do.
Draft Not yet checked by a native French speaker.
How do people use C’est du gâteau
?
Familiar and friendly, used to brush off a task or reassure someone: “t’inquiète, c’est du gâteau”. It moves through the tenses with être: “c’était du gâteau”, “ce sera du gâteau”. The negative is just as common and means the opposite: “c’est pas du gâteau”, it’s no picnic.
Also said c’était du gâteau, ce sera du gâteau
C’est du gâteau
in real sentences
-
C’est du gâteau.
It’s a piece of cake.
Tatoeba, sentence by pkill, translation by Eldad, CC BY 2.0 FR
-
Ce sera du gâteau.
It’ll be as easy as pie.
Tatoeba, sentence by sacredceltic, translation by Nuel, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does C’est du gâteau
come from?
The picture is the same as the English: cake goes down without effort. French Wiktionary gives no date or story for it, only quotations from the 1990s on and the matching pair “c’est de la tarte” and “c’est pas du gâteau”. There’s no reliable account of where or when it started.
Mistakes learners make with C’est du gâteau
Translating “a piece of cake” word for word as “c’est un morceau de gâteau”, which only describes a slice on a plate. French uses the partitive: “c’est du gâteau”, it’s cake.
Other French idioms like C’est du gâteau
Spot a mistake in C’est du gâteau
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.