French language Q&A Forum

The sentence above is used by philosopher Martin Heidegger in his letter to Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945. Why did he use Le Passé Composé, though "depuis" is used? 

I understood ¨pelle¨ as shovel.  Is there no difference?

Dear Aurélie,

These writing exercises are a true exercise in humility.  I test in the 90's for C1 grammar but I consistently fail (often get less than 50%) in the writing exercises.  It took me over a year to accept this - I always would find my performance very disappointing and avoided the exercises (tip to others: don't avoid.  They will improve your French, painfully and slowly in my case).  The writing exercises  are excellent and introduce a wide variety of expressions and of contexts, but perhaps students should be forewarned that one's grammar level on Kwiziq will be higher than one's performance on the translation/writing exercises.  

I understand the lesson pretty well, but a question on pronunciation. Is the audio correct when it pronounces the sentence "J'attends plus de mes parents" with "plus" as [plu] instead of [plus]? It seems like this could be confusing in spoken French, in that it might be mistaken for "Je [n']attends plus de mes parents," but maybe the "de" makes it obvious that this is not a ne...plus construction where the "ne" is simply dropped/implied? (Maybe there's a lesson focusing on the pronunciation of "plus," but I've not seen it yet.)

The problem I had with the question is that it did not indicate that TIME OF DAY was the topic. Strictly, this could be a question about a house or office number cruise liner cabin number or the answer to a mathematical question. I chose NOT to take the topic as being about the time of day because the question was too general to know what was the topic.

brosse should have an s at the end when you say I brushed them