French language Q&A Forum

I recently saw a rule that confuses me regarding qualitative adjectives. It says absolute qualities should not be modified by additional adjectives if they are comparative or superlative.

One example was "delicieux", it is an absolute quality and one should not say "c'est tres delicieux". To me, this makes no sense. If true, many people break the rule. Plus, I don't consider "tres" a comparative or superlative. Some of the other examples given were "éternel, parfait & admirable". I did a lot of searching and can find no other references, but I may be missing a magic keyword. I would ignore it except that the source is usually good and it was in the context of "very common French errors"

The rule does seem to make sense with some adjectives, from an English perspective. One would not say something is "very eternal", it's either eternal or it's not. I don't see delicious the same way.

Am I misunderstanding this? Can someone clarify? 

Cécile has answered a couple of questions on the noun "prouesse" but I don't quite understand the subtlety here. I put "leur prouesse sportive m'impressionne sans cesse" (i.e. in the singular), which I think sounds the same as the plural "leurs prouesses sportives m'impressionnent sans cesse". Cécile said the plural is correct in this case as it referred to both twins, but "leur dynamisme", "leur esprit d'indépendance" and "leur passion" all equally referred to both twins and these were all in the singular. Why is it only their sporting prowess that is plural here? Thanks. 

Comme chaque année depuis que tu nous as quittéS

I did read the lesson on past participle agreement with avoir but am still not sure why the 's' is needed in the above.

this is beautiful, but where is the  bilingual reader, where you can click any French phrase for the English translation and related grammar

Can we say "pour trouver le cadeau parfait" as well a "pour chercher le cadeau parfait"?

Thanks8

I just wanted to confirm that "cet après-midi" would have also been acceptable ? I didn't realise it, but there seems to be a polemic about the gender of après-midi,  it can apparently be either masculine or feminine, but  l'Académie favours the masculine.

Does that seem reasonable in the context of this dictée ? Any other comments anyone ?

Thanks, Paul.

see this link

https://forum.lefigaro.fr/forum/affich-490-cet-ou-cette-apres-midi

Si j'ai bien compris, la prouesse peux s'exprimer au pluriel. C'est undifference idiomatique entre le francais et l'anglais.

In the last sentence, the speaker says he can't eat salad without bread and "salad" is expressed as "de salade." Shouldn't it be "de la salade?"

to think of someone is both de and a int he examples, is there a way to know which to use?