French language Q&A Forum

Bonjour,

Mauvais is usually an adjective, but is it being used as an adverb when we say the weather is bad?

e.g. il fait mauvais.

or is it still being an adjective, and is modifying the noun: 'the weather' (replaced here by the pronoun: "it"), please?

Cheryl

Before the exercise I put the vocab given into Google Translate if I don't know them.  I didn't know "des jumelles" and it comes back "binoculars."     Larousse also says that les jumelles are an optical instrument.  However, since that made no sense, I put the whole phrase into Google Translate and it came back "the twins are twelve" -- which of course makes sense.  But for a beginner it was very confusing not to find the definition of "twins" for this word I didn't know.  Is it colloquial for jumelles to mean twins?

BTW, I look forward to the dictees every week.  Keep them coming!

Why is "and the accordion used to touch her chin" translated as "et l'accordéon lui touchait le menton" and not as "et l'accordéon la touchait le menton"?

When toucher is used with a noun as an object the pronoun is "la", e.g. "it touches Marie" is "ça touche Marie" and "it touches her" is "ça la touche" so why is "lui" correct in the case above? It seems to imply that the verb was "toucher à".