French language Q&A Forum

In your first two examples I see: "soit du fromage, soit un dessert" and then "j'aimerais soit une tablette soit un nouveau portable."  I've looked to no avail to find an explanation for the usage/non-usage of a comma in the two phrases.  Could you please elucidate?

Est-ce qu'en peux faire les mots vont plus lentement. Je ne comprends pas.  C'est trop vite!

In this lesson, these two words sounded like 'Foy" and 'Moy" (like the english word 'toy').  A subsequent lesson on adjectives that change meaning according to position had the speaker (a male) pronounce them like' Mwa' and ' Fwa'.  ( Google translate and Forvo used the latter pronunciation too) . Could some one please shed light on this? 

Why is this sentence "Tu m'as bien aidé cette semaine-là." translated as last week and not that week? Merci!

How  and when to use avoir beau 

This lesson doesn’t explain why sont isn’t necessary in the sentence: Ils brûlent tous. They ARE burning all the books. I got this wrong with no explanation as to why. Help? Thanks. 

<< Vous les montrez à mon père et vous ________ ensuite. >>

The answer is : << me les montrez >>

Why isn't  << les montrez à moi >> allowed in this case?

À ma connaissance, le mot juste est une calque sur français du mot « just » en anglais.  « Just » est un adverbe en anglais, mais je le crois un adjectif en français. Par exemple:  « ce que tu dis est juste » en français, mais on ne dit pas « je suis juste arrivé ».  One dirait « je viens d’arriver » pour éviter le calque erroné , mais je pense que « juste au cas où » est INCORRECT.   

Pourrait-on clarifier ce point de grammaire pour moi?  Merci beaucoup  

Dr Michael Elinski

What does one base on to add "du" "de la" "de l' "? ........ 

Hi there Aurellie, I am just a bit confused about some aspects of this website. I love the way Laura teaches, but this is just really a bit of feedback which you have asked for in the past: I have lived in French speaking Switzerland for fifteen winter seasons...teaching in French, have done a primary school teacher qualification specialising in French and have passed some quite advanced grammer levels within this website system, yet it still baffles me by directing me from time time to quite a low level...for instance, how to say your name...? I can't see that I can have possibly got only 33% in this at any point...is it some kind of tactic of the website it wonder...? or just some kind of shortcoming...? ah well, just thought I'd mention it for feedback in case of the latter.

Best regards,

Michael