French language Q&A Forum

This was a question in one of the quizzes:

Il m'a offert une boîte ________ bijoux pour ranger mes colliers.

Yes, for introducing me to some new expressions, i.e. "tu n'as pas l'air dans ton assiette", "j'ai du mal à fermer l'œil" and "de fester de marbre".  Now, to try to use them!

I notice that the preferred translation of 'which makes him the first Frenchman to be in charge of the ISS' is 'ce qui fait de lui le premier Français en charge de la SSI' rather than 'ce qui en fait le premier ...'. All the grammar books I look at say that en can stand for 'de' plus a person - but I can see that in practice 'en fait' for 'makes him' is almost never said in French. Is it just too literary for this kind of phrase?

This sounds like an opinion to me. I thought it should be in the imparfait. Could someone kindly shed light on this for me?

Je pense que Madame Lambert a besoin d’un nouveau vétérinaire!

Is there any way of speeding up the audio to something more akin to proper speech?

I translated this exercise perfectly but scored zero. That was I misunderstood and found the exercise difficult to interpret.

I would have thought (and did!) that it should be "ces héros ont souffert de la discrimination" rather than "ces héros ont souffert de discrimination"; in the same way that "ces héros ont subi de la discrimination" was noted as a correct answer.

Is there something specific to "souffrir de" that causes the article to be dropped?

dont la renommée rayonne encore:

whose reKnown still shines → whose renown still shines