French language Q&A Forum

Hi,

I'm curious of how to distinguish "Ils les leur envoient." and "Il les leur envoie" while listening? They sound same in pronunciation.

 "alors il va préparer l'entré", aint it should be "elle" not "il" referring to her mom ?

The use of 'many' is unidiomatic and characteristic of language lessons, rather than of spoken English. As this is a French lesson, not an English one, you may not regard this as critical. However, 'I have read many books' and 'He sent me many flowers' sound uncomfortably like translations from French or sentences spoken in fiction by a stereotypical francophone character. I would suggest that a native speaker would be more likely to say e.g. 'I have read a lot of books' or 'He sent me lots of flowers'. Yes, these are less direct translations of the French wording, but too much language tuition across all media has been and continues to be based on unidiomatic explanations and translations, not to mention the deployment of idiomatic expressions which no one has used for half a century.

This may be a strange question, but if you have/see a female dog and you want to describe her, would you use il or elle since "dog" is a masculine noun but the dog itself is a female. Like would I say Il est très gentil or elle est très gentille? I am asking because where I live I always hear female dogs referred to as "il" even when everyone knows the dog is a girl. I don't know if that's just because they don't care about the gender of the dog, or because the proper way to refer to it is as "il" since dog is masculine. 

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