French language Q&A Forum

Is ‘its been a long time since ‘ always followed by a verb in the negative? Some language sites seem to have sentences without a negative.

How come there's no "la" in front of Guadeloupe?

There's even a suggested lesson for this translation exercise that says that country names are preceded by the definite article? Using le, la, l', les with continents, countries & regions names (definite articles)%252Fsearch%253Fs%253Darticle%252Bcountry

The correct answer of this sentence is : Je n'avais qu'une ambition

Can we also translate it as ' Il ne me restait qu'une ambition ' ?

When do you use the definite article with countries and regions?There's a kwiziq lesson about this: Using le, la, l', les with continents, countries & regions names (definite articles)

But in the text, country and region names are never accompanied by the definite article. E.g., "Duché de Bretagne," "royaume de France," "couronne de France," etc. 

Also, I translated "beforehand" as "à l'avance" instead of "au préalable," which I thought were the same thing, but it wasn't one of the accepted answers.

Je m'apelle Ayşe Nur et je viens de Dinde.

Hi, one of the examples includes “ passez l’aspirateur”. Presumably this means to use the aspirateur to clean. In English we would not use the direct translation using “pass”. Most often someone would say “do the hoovering”, or possibly “use the hoover” or “use the vacuum cleaner”. I may he wrong, maybe the sentence just means “pass me the hoover (as you are holding it)” but then the example makes less sense. Does passer l’aspirateur mean to use a vacuum cleaner?

"on aurait dit un savage" translates to it looked like a savage, but I'm unsure of the rule for that. Is there a lesson on this?