French language Q&A Forum

Re: Habiter vs Vivre

If I understand correctly, using a preposition after habiter or vivre is optional unless it’s followed by a country or continent. Then it would be “en” for feminine countries and masculine countries beginning with a vowel and for the six feminine continents.

“Au” for masculine countries starting with a consonant and “aux” for plural countries.

When using habiter or vivre with cities it would be à or nothing at all. When using habiter or vivre with regions, provinces, states and counties, again the preposition is optional. My question is when you do not use a preposition, do you use the definite article?

eg., With preposition it’s “J’habite dans le Merseyside.”

Without preposition is it “J’habite Merseyside.” Or J’habite le Merseyside.”

Thank you!

The above sentence was part of a quiz.  Does sur not take a modifier?  Shouldn't it be sur l'internet?

Why we say 

Elle est son sac

Not Elle est sa sac

It would be useful for this lesson to point out that the issue of agreement only arises with être verbs (and the passive voice). No question arises for example with "Hier, on a quitté le travail plus tôt."

Is there any other chance that I could take the level test again?

Why is is not "vous n'avez pas DE petite place......"?

why is 

'je vous la donne'  the translation for 'I give it to you' when we don't know the gender of 'it'? shouldn't it be 'je vous le donne'

in the same manner why is 'je la lui a écrite' - i wrote it to her - not 'je le lui a écrit'?  

In this exercise I got this tense wrong (as I usually do for the verb devoir). The linked lesson on this topic is misleading. It says that when devoir is used in the imparfait e.g je devais, it means I was supposed to do (an obligation, in most cases not met) whereas it has a different meaning in the passé composé where j’ai dû = I had to do, or I must have done (an obligation that was met, or a hypothesis on a past situation). This doesn’t seem to be correct in practice, where if it is a repeated action we would still use the imparfait.

For example, this week’s exercise asked us to translate “... that we had to develop (use nous)”. I put: “que nous avons dû développer” which is in accord with the lesson but was marked as incorrect, with one of the given options being “que nous devions développer”. Although I can see the logic in that, it appears on the surface to directly contradict what the linked lesson tells us.

(Interestingly, in the full text of the passage after the exercise, they used “qu’il fallait développer” which does get around this problem, but it is sort of cheating, as we were told to use “nous” when translating this particular phrase, haha)

"et je m'étais préparé une journée aux petits oignons." 

Since the speaker/narrator is clearly a women, wouldn't the sentence be...

"et je m'étais préparée une journée aux petits oignons." ???