French language Q&A Forum

"le propriétaire m'a dit que vous étiez mon fournisseur d'électricité".

Can you explain the use of the imperfect tense in this context?

I chose "vous seriez"rather than 'vous  étiez".  I interpreted "were" as conditional (ie, as "you would be") rather than literally "you were".  I thought that Bruno was not already a client of the electricity provider. Is this acceptable?

In terms of translating into French, it seems that the two phrases above are equivalent in meaning. All the examples use a construction in English that is correct but not necessarily how people would say it. It would be quite normal and grammatically correct to say the simpler phrase, "I just ate my breakfast." Would someone ever use the passe compose in the "venir de + infinitive", and if so, what does it mean in English? I expect that the venir in the pluperfect + infinitive would mean "I HAD just [done something]."

The note about répartir in this lesson:

Note that the verb répartir is NOT a derivative of partir, but shares its root with the word repartition, and does follow the regular -IR conjugation.

Is a little confusing, because 'partir' is not mentioned anywhere, and there is a very subtle difference with 'repartir' that is also not mentioned. Having some of this context would help!

Hi,

In a context outside these lessons, I was asked to put the following sentence in la voix passive:

"Le conducteur n'a pas pu arrêter le train à temps."

I thought it would be straightforward and answered as follows:

"Le train n'a pas été pu arrêter à temps par le conducteur."

But this was marked as false, with the correct answer being:

"Le train n'a pas pu être arrêter à temps par le conducteur."

I don't believe the use of la voix passive with modal verbs (pouvoir, devoir, vouloir) was covered explicitly in this lesson, so I wanted to ask if you could please explain these rules, since it seems they might differ from the rules presented here.

thanks, Scott