French language Q&A Forum

How are we to guess at correct punctuation?  Unless you can remember the entire speech, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a section should end with a comma, a period or an exclamation point.  (And, actually, the sentence beginning "Paul va prendre sa voiture..." is a declarative sentence and not a question.) I have not been counting myself off where such punctuation is concerned because there seems to be no definite way to determine what the correct punctuation should be.

"Navré, grommela-t-il au vieil homme minuscule qu'il avait manqué de faire tomber." 

Online translator says: "Sorry," he mumbled to the tiny old man whom he had nearly knocked over."

How is "manqué de" being used here?

It would be great to have more exercises like this.

I'm adding into what Avery said about how this grammar point could use some clarification, as I find this one particularly confusing as well. Thank you Avery!

It's unclear that some activities can be referred to by both faire and jouer. I only figured this out because I got dinged on a test for not knowing that basketball is one of these. I do see that the examples show this, but an explicit explanation would be nice. Or a list of common activities and whether they are faire or jouer would be helpful. 

The section on faire de la danse vs danser could be clarified a bit more too. There are gray sentences for the example English phrases, but they aren't translated into French. I can't see how the sentences in French would be built without making my own guesses.

Thanks guys!

1. Why is the tense different if you use "dès que" vs "aussitôt que"? In the text: Dès que nous étions rentrés de l'école (PC) Vs Aussitôt que nous étions de retour (Imparfait)?

2. Couldn't one say "Entre tous les joeux..." instead of parmi or de? Or is it "entre" only used when referring to two things (like between vs among)?

I just have one suggestion to make the seek bar (at the top) movable at the vocal section so that we can listen to how to pronounce and complete the sentence in the native way. Right now it is in one go.. if i have to listen , how to say the second last line I have to listen from the very beginning till the second last sentence.
Hope someone fix this.
I am learning french from you guys... Its Fabulous. Thanks for the material

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I'm confused. Doesn't ..ing in English denote the present participle? In French that would suggest "leaving" would be expressed as "partant", "talking" as "parlant" etc; not the  use of the infinitive. 

This sentence is in the past tense, but why didn't we use subjonctif passe?

It is very helpful to have a list of specific french words or phases that will feature in the following text.  However, it would be even more helpful if these words and phases were also spoken in advance so that one can tune into them when they arise in the piece.