cope on

bieasy said:

Hi,


If someone want to do something and I don't want to help him can I say: 'cope alone'?

ex: A- I don't know how to get there. Can you help me?
B- You're not a child anymore! Cope alone!

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bieasy said:

Hi,


If someone wants to do something and I don't want to help him, can I say 'cope alone'?

ex: A- I don't know how to get there. Can you help me?
B- You're not a child anymore! Cope alone!

Click to expand...

emsr2d2 said:

As Raymott said, it's not idiomatic but it's grammatically acceptable. I've never said it. I would be more likely to say "Do it on your own" or "You need to learn to cope with things like this on your own".

I tend to differentiate between "alone" and "on your own" - "alone" would be how I would describe, for example, someone who lives in a house/flat with no other people (He lives alone), or that someone perhaps went somewhere without anyone else (He went on holiday alone). I would use "on his/your/etc own" to mean "without anyone else's help" (He built that bookcase on his own).

That's not a hard and fast rule, by the way, just how I think I use the two phrases.

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bieasy said:

What about 'cope on your own'? That's weird when some terms are often used in Portuguese or French, and it's hard to find the equivalent term in English. In French we often say 'débrouille toi' and in Portuguese 'se vira'.

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Raymott said:

Another variant is "You're old enough to cope with that by yourself".

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