French language Q&A Forum

Tous les jours, je fais des efforts pour aider la planète. Par example, quand je vais au supermarché, j'apporte mon sac en toile et j'évite les emballages de plastique. Et si j'achète un café à emporter, j'utilise ma tasse réutilisable. À la maison, je ne gaspille pas l'eau et he recycle mes déchets. Quand je ne peux pas faire de vélo, je prends les transports en commun ou je fais du covoiturage. 

As I know we use "en" to replace a noun that follows number/quantity such as un(e), deux, un peu de etc.. so in this case it means that I can use "en" to replace ANY noun including "idée, histoire, conseil, chance" etc but only with any indefinite article, right? And in examples like "je vais vous donner une idee" "il raconte une histoire à mon ami" these nouns can be also replaced with "en", right? or not? why? I passed several tests where these nouns were replaced with COD(le,la,les) and I really can't understand why.. can someone explain it to me, please?

I just learned that etre exciter means being sexually aroused and not excited. Perhaps we can clarify. Les filles étaient tout excitées de voir le feu d'artifice.

Just a quick question. Is qu’est-ce que + noun always more formal? I found it a bit confusing that 

a. the last two examples of it in Section 3 have no further mention of register and 

b. in Sections 1 and 3 the examples go from less to more elegant, whereas in 2 it’s the other way round.

Do realise this is an A0 lesson, but the concepts behind it are quite challenging.

Dear Céline,

I would be most grateful to know why "du" appears in "Vous vous rappeler du petit restaurant italien ..." and "de" in "Tu te rappelles ton professeur de maths."

What is India called in French?

Can we say aux agents de bord instead of avec les agents de bord?

At a minimum, it seems like there should be a conjunction or a que to better structure the sentence.

Anyway, can someone translate/explain this sentence?

I continually get tripped up with this. I interpret the statement as being the last (previous) time so I enter ‘la fois dernière’ which is marked as incorrect. If the correct answer is ‘la dernière fois’ what is it about the statement that tells me that it’s the last (final) time?

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.