French language Q&A Forum

In the exercise "The Town of Gruyères", the translation of "Before we even entered the picturesque village," is given as "Avant même que nous entrions dans le bourg/village pittoresque,". I think it should be 'nous sommes entrés dans ...'. What am I getting wrong there? Also, I'm aking my self, does an optional 'ne explétif' go before 'entrions'?

Because "gens" is "people" - plural - I put "...les gens qui sortent constamment leurs portables de leurs poches". Is there anything in the pronuncation that I missed that showed it was definitely singular? Or is it a rule in french that you would always say "they took their phone from their pocket" unless they all owned several phones and were taking them out of more than one pocket each? Or...was my answer plausibly a correct hearing?

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?

Alors:

"Maman EMPORTAIT toujours beaucoup de....."

"Tu APPORTAIS tes poupées....."

Better to use correct grammar, esp. on a teaching site ...AIN'T that so?

Why "populaire animateur de...", and not "animateur populaire de..." ?

I translated this as 'Ce sera tellement rigolote' presuming we were talking about the 'farce' which is feminine. It was corrected as rigolo masculine. ?

My comment is similar to Elizabeth's, so I hope your response will also be similar.

My answer to...

À ce moment-là, les étoiles ________ dans le ciel.

was "sont apparus". This is wrong because I didn't know that étoiles is feminine. But the only correction given was "ont apparu".

I was wondering why the use of indefinite articles with descriptive nouns was no longer in use. For example, I learned to say "Je suis une chanteuse." But, a textbook I am using in my class simply says "Je suis chanteuse." First, why is the un or une no longer included and second, is it grammatically correct to say something like "Je suis fille." or "Il est homme."? Much appreciated for any help. Rules have changed since I was a student.

How do you say “Not only…”?