French language Q&A Forum

Why is "and the accordion used to touch her chin" translated as "et l'accordéon lui touchait le menton" and not as "et l'accordéon la touchait le menton"?

When toucher is used with a noun as an object the pronoun is "la", e.g. "it touches Marie" is "ça touche Marie" and "it touches her" is "ça la touche" so why is "lui" correct in the case above? It seems to imply that the verb was "toucher à".

This is translated by Kwiziq and others as "elle a toujours aimé cet instrument" so I expect that is correct but why is it not "elle aimait toujours cet instrument"?

The action is not completed, it is ongoing. Why doesn't that make L'Imparfait the appropriate tense?

In the A1 writing challenge "Learning the guitar" the question

"because I find that it's a soothing instrument"

suggests the answer

"car je trouve cet instrument apaisant."

which I can see is very elegant but why is my answer incorrect:

"car je la trouve d'être un instrument apaisant"

I can find other examples on the web of similar usage such this:

"...que nous avons trouvé d'être un trait distinctif..."

two issues:

#1: question was: “What is the French number ‘14,052’ in English?”  This question should read “What is the ENGLISH number ‘14,052’ in FRENCH?”  A lot of your number questions are written back to front.

2nd issue:  I answered ‘14 052’ but it was marked wrong and the less common ‘14.052’ was given as the correct answer.  But my answer is correct...?

où on a degouté des specialities lyonnaises/ où on dégoutait des specialities lyonnaises (where we enjoyed Lyonnaise specialities)

I don't understand why this can't be in the imparfait as there's no end time. Is it passé composé because it is NOW finished?  It seems like this is something that happened over a period of time in the past, not quickly, so I used imparfait.

Cannot "même si" be equally followed l'imparfait del'ndicatif as in:

Même s'il me le disait, je ne le croirais pas.