French language Q&A Forum

Can anyone explain why the subjunctive 'puisse' is used here?

What is the difference between de la Maison and à la Maison? When do you use de and when do you use à. 

I notice that my answers in this lesson might as well be random.

This lesson opens with the statement:

“In French, there are two different structures to express "reminding", depending on whether we mean to be reminded of [something] or to prompt someone to remember [to do something].”

Let’s call to be reminded of something ‘A’ and to prompt someone to remember ‘B’

The structure of A is:

“rappeler + person one's reminded of + à + person being reminded”

unless an object pronoun appears in the sentence. If there is, the structure of A becomes:

”me/te/lui/nous/vous/leur + rappeler + person one is reminded of"

So there are two different sentence structures  for A.

When we want to prompt someone to remember (B), the structure is:

"rappeler + à + person being reminded + de+ [infinitif]”

unless an object pronoun appears in the sentence. If there is, the structure of B becomes:

“me/te/lui/nous/vous/leur + rappeler + de + [infinitif]”

Note this involves two different sentence structures in the case of B. 

Each of these sentence structures differ, one from the others, so in fact there are four structures involved in French to express reminding.

As the lesson is presented, a student must retain these four only slightly different structures and identify where to use them in order to progress with this lesson.

Were the lesson split in two - using the A and B situations described above, the student would need to retain and identify only two structures at a time, leading to a better chance of succeeding in A before progressing to B.

I imagine this would lead to this lesson attracting less confusion and improved learning. Or am I missing something? Is there a logic or pattern that evades me?

If you want to say "I think about my wife". ChatGPT suggests I say "Je pense à elle", instead of "Je lui pense".

It says "Je lui pense" can be grammaticaly correct but it's too formal, old or used in literary.

However, this lesson says nothing about this. Can anyone explain this?

In the phrase 'Jules m'apprendra à faire du snowboard', I used 'enseignera' but this was not listed as an optional answer. Could you explain please? Thanks.

you reference a video without giving a link to it!

Bonjour, 

I was wondering why "pas" isnt used in "ça ne fait rien", as usually to express a negative you'd have to use "ne ... pas". Is "pas" something that has been dropped in the expression over time? And are there other expressions which also use "ne" without the "pas"?

Thanks! 

Hi, do you have a lesson/primer on the various accent marks used over letters, including how they are pronounced and when to use them? I have tried several searches on the site and cannot find it. 

I find this topic confusing, and it trips me up in the lessons.

Thanks, Larissa

why is it: ils ont des dollars et des euro. 

Why use des, not les as money is coutable? 

The question was “This is a number written in French: 78,005. How would it be expressed in English? The reply was: 78.005. Am I gapping or was the question supposed to be “ This is a number written in English: 78,005. How would it be expressed in French?