French language Q&A Forum

When doing the writing tests, I find myself regularly struggling with knowing when to place accents (and regularly second-guessing myself too!).

Are there any rules of thumb to help with this? For example, the 'ô' seems to always appear in words which sound similar in english and one would place an 's': eg hôpital, hôtel, hôte, etc.

I generally have trouble with accented 'e's (ignoring the "obvious" accents, such as when using the passé composé and other conjugation rules) so any advice would be very welcome.

I needed to research these expressions.

Sorry but I don't have accents. Why is it "ressemblent a des ecailles" and not "aux ecailles"?

Why "dans"?  Isn't stadium a general place rather than a specific one?  Like "in prison" = "en la prision"?

The example cited in the page of instruction regarding ''Expressing intervals of dates and times in French = from ... to' is 'The festival lasts from the 24th of July to the 5th of August'/'Le festival dure du 24 juillet au 5 août'. 

I am therefore puzzled by the answer to the fill-in the-blank question 'Le festival dure ________ mai/The festival lasts from the third to the tenth of May'. My answer was 'du troisième au dixième', while the answer provided as a correction was 'du trois au dix'

Perhaps I'm being stupid, but my answer seems to follow the example better than the correction. Where is my error?

Peut-on utilise "Dès lors" dans la phrase "D'ici là, je devrais être prêt pour une longue sieste"

et pour j'ai décidé de prendre la situation en main

on peut écrire "j'ai décidé de maîtriser la situation ?

Merci

That would literally translate to “chose a service punctual or regular.” Why isn’t instead “ponctuel et régulier?”