French language Q&A Forum

"I really need you to find out the reason why it's not working anymore,"

Regarding the above please explain why the imperfect tense is used for the verb trouver (trouviez), I would have thought that either the present tense (trouvez) ... "you find out"

or the future tense (trouverez) ... "you will find out"

would correctly translate from the English text? 

Thank you.

There is a concealed difficulty in this lesson for English speakers who don't know how to congregate the irregular verb "hurt".  The examples provided are very good and demonstrate the problem, but i needed a good English grammar book to correctly identify the problem.

hurt       (v           pr))

hurts     (v           pr3)

hurt       (v           pt)

hurt       (v           pp)

Would an alternative translation to the above be: "It was nice yesterday"    ?

Why do I sometimes see “l’on” rather than “on” used as a subject?

D'abord, ils ont pris des feuilles de papier rouge, orange et jaune,

I'm struggling to see why rouge and jaune are singular. 

I know it is correct, for example : des feuilles de papier blanc = white sheets of paper.

Can anyone explain with a simple rule?

I think basically the point is the colours agree with the material, (papier= unaccountable, singular noun in this context), not with the "sheets".

Is there a general rule I can apply , perhaps about en/de + a material ?

I'm guessing it's something like this:

When describing what an object is made of, it is always treated as a singular noun ?

Thanks, Paul.

I had the same problem that Kathleen had even after I listened to it a number of times.  Of course, once I saw the correct version, it was wonderfully clear!

Hi. I'm wondering about the sentence Elles ne se sont pas rasees cette semaine./ They didin't shave this week.  You would normally associate shaving with men, not women as in your example.  Wouldn't it be  better to change the subject of the sentence to ILS ne sont pas rases cette semaine, and a week being a long time to go without shaving, the end could be 

ce  matin, not cette semaine. and you would get a nice sentence 

They (men) didn't shave this morning.

tu as faim.