French language Q&A Forum

In your correction, you said that "nous avons aussi appris a changer une roue" rather than un pneu.  Une roue translates, as per my dictionary, to be "a wheel," while  "un pneu" is a tire.  I'm probably splitting hairs, but it is different to change a wheel than a tire; the wheel is the base on which the tire sits and would therefore be a much bigger job than changing the tire alone.  As I said, I'm splitting hairs, but want to know if in common parlance, the roue is changed when the pneu is flat.  Also, others have asked the other questions I had - about the use of plus-que-parfait (suggested but not actually used in the "correct" translation) and about the use of encore rather than toujours.  Thanks for your help.  It is greatly appreciated!

Before the exercise I put the vocab given into Google Translate if I don't know them.  I didn't know "des jumelles" and it comes back "binoculars."     Larousse also says that les jumelles are an optical instrument.  However, since that made no sense, I put the whole phrase into Google Translate and it came back "the twins are twelve" -- which of course makes sense.  But for a beginner it was very confusing not to find the definition of "twins" for this word I didn't know.  Is it colloquial for jumelles to mean twins?

BTW, I look forward to the dictees every week.  Keep them coming!

The quiz asked "It's lame", "_____ nul".

The answer that it wants is "C'est nul".

Why can't it be "Il est nul"?

Suppose the sentence was a response to the question "What do you think of that film?"

The answer is providing an opinion with an adjective which it is applying to a specific thing - "that film".

That sounds a lot like case 2b in the lesson:

"2. Cases expressing opinions or simple statements (adjectives) about prementioned things"

"b. il est/elle est  for statements and opinions related to specific things"

Au sud, dans le sud etc.  Which preposition is correct, and if both can be  used, is there a difference in when they are used ?

Merci en avance !