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Let me take a look at that...
Questions answered by our learning community with help from expert French teachers
14,674 questions • 31,790 answers • 963,586 learners
This seems to be a repeated question which I have yet to find a clear answer to. Jaques est descendu du haricot magique is translated as Jaques got off the magic bean and not came down the magic bean. However, looking at my bilingual dictionary (Le Grand Robert Collins), under the entry for descendre as an intransitive verb is included "descendre de l'échelle" translated as "to come down the ladder". This seems to be contradicting the information given here and I would be grateful for further comment
I have reported this beforehand, which might have been the wrong thing to do before posting to the Q&A Forum, but it seems my point was missed by the person responding to the report, so I'll try to see if this is a better place for a more fluid conversation.
I'm not a native speaker of either English(though my proficiency level is definitely not low) or French(not so good with this one yet), but it seems to me that both *I'm going to go* and *I will go* can be used for immediate future (whatever ''planning'' arrangements might be), and it's rather ambiguous in the french sentence to deduce that *am going to go* should be used over *will go*, thus to me it would seem that both variants should be accepted as viable answers.
I would be glad if somebody could clear up why one is acceptable, and the other is not.
Thank you.
In one of the answers to a question in the corresponding lesson regarding articles for countries, Cécile advises that Israel and some random island countries like Malta, Cyprus, Haiti and Cuba do NOT take an article (le, la, les or l’). From the above exercise it appears that Monaco is also included on this small list of countries without a gender. Just out of interest, does anyone know why Monaco doesn’t have one? I wondered if it was because it’s just an abbreviation of la Principauté de Monaco? (But then again, the names of most countries are abbreviations of their official names, so that doesn’t help us to decide whether to add an article, and maybe it’s just something we have to learn individually for each country)
The turkey was so burnt that he had had to get another one. Isnt the part after the that subjonctif?
L’imparfait - what a minefield ! It’s not a question, but i’ve found that when it’s used to express habits or repeated actions more sense is made in the English when ‘would’ is used over ‘used to’ - which indeed you’ve noted in your lesson. This has helped me understand its use in French.
So a sentence like “Je lisais tous les jours” could be translated as “I would / used to read every day”
I don’t understand why “Je me suis bien amusée.” adds the “e” for the feminine subject but “Je me suis lavé les dents.” does not when both speakers are female.
Bonjour Madame,
What does the phrase “Qu’est-ce que vous avez de bon aujourd’hui?” mean ?
I am unable to get the meaning in the dictionary.
Merci d’avance.
Bonjour,
I'm a bit confused about how pouvoir in the conditional mood would translate/ be interpreted in English. How will I differentiate pouvoir in these two tenses?
Thank you! :)
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