French language Q&A Forum

Most of the lessons on this site help with grammatical understanding, however this is the first lesson I’m struggling to understand. I’ve found some commenters useful after being overly frustrated with getting the quizzes wrong, but I feel this article needs an update for further clarity.

I can see why you could use the pluperfect for "They would have had a dog if they had been able to". But "... could have" seems to call for the conditional past (although I agree that the meaning is the same).

Thanks

I have used sauf si instead of à moins que and it marked me wrong. I thougth that the two were interchangeable. 

Very, very difficult to distinguish which answer in English is actually correct. Could not be more subtle which makes it very difficult to select the correct answer

Très bonne exercice pour pratiquer mon pauvre français. Je

I always understood that if you use 'on' that you had to match it with 'son mécontentement 'ie. 'On' with 'son' and 'nous' with 'notre'

Can anyone clarify ?

in america, If you say "I took my exam" it means you were present. It does not refer to passing. If you took the exam and passed, then you say, I passed my exams. But you cannot say, I took when you received a pass or fail or grade. 

in america, there is no such thing as "i will lay the table" that literally means you are making or forcing the table to lay down. but you would not do that to an object, nor would you phrase it that way because a table cannot lay down, it stands and does nothing else. i am finding a lot of phrases that are difficult to translate because of this. i have also sought help with french speaking friends who have helped me and when i provide the answer, the platform says i am wrong and reverses the answer. such as the case with adjectives position before or after. 

Hello, is there a way to mark exercises in some way so you could query the marked list, just like we can do with Notebooks for lessons?  I have some dictees and writing exercises to which I want to return, but I don't know how to do that other than writing the names down.  If not, it would be a really nice feature to add.

I came across ‘je ne pense pas qu’ils auraient reussi à s’arracher à lui s’il était revenu.’  (Harry Potter translation).  Although penser when negated takes the subjunctive is the subjunctive not used when a conditional tense is needed? I guess I’m not sure whether tenses change the use of the subjunctive. I read the future changes to the present to us the subjunctive.