Enthusiastic support for the passé simple.Unlike some comment leavers on this page, I *adore* the passé simple and I find it extremely useful.
That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I enjoy reading French history and literature. (For example, Les Trois mousquetaires is an amazing romp ! Much better in the original French than in any English translation that I've seen.)
I would be hopelessly confused in my reading without a solid understanding of the passé simple (to say nothing of the passé antérieur and *all* the tenses of the subjonctif) !
Different people learn French for different purposes. All the purposes are legitimate, in my view. It's a pretty big website, and I support the principle that the lessons should cover as much of la langue française as possible.
That said, I would be grateful to have more coverage of informal French. When I watch movies, I often find myself at a loss to understand what is being said by one character to another, even though I have a pretty good command of C1-level formal French. Maybe mine is a minority interest, but I just want to mention it.
In any case:
Great site! Many thanks!
"Les aventures d'Astérix sont traduites" - Grateful if you could explain why "traduites" is used instead of "traduisent". My thinking is that the translation refers to the adventures (which is plural). Thank you in advance!
Can I review the entire text of what I wrote so I can compare it as a whole text with the corrected text please?
Why is the verb « aller » inserted in the answer ? « nous te disons de ne pas aller te coucher » . Why isn’t it « nous te disons de ne pas te coucher » ?
For "these old objects" I tried "ces objets anciens" and was corrected to "ces anciens objets". Is ancien going before the noun here because there is some sense of former-ness (the objects aren't what they used to be), even though they are still objects?
I was doing the exercise (https://kwiziq.learnfrenchwithalexa.com/my-languages/french/exercises/judge/1833/14548249?response=4150265&page=7) to answer a question and now have one of my own:
There's the phrase: visiter les ruines du vieux château.
How come the rule that the definite article is omitted if there's an adjective intervening between de and the noun is not applicable here? I would have thought this should be ...de vieux château.
This explanation doesn't explain why sometimes one says 'L'hiver' and at other times, 'En hiver', and similar for other seasons. The examples given do not enlighten me much. I have always had trouble with this. At first I thought, oh, you use 'l'hiver' when you are going to say something describing a feature of 'hiver', and 'En hiver' when you want to say something happened during 'hiver', but then the other examples given in context of other seasons etc mostly described activities occurring during the season regardless of the 'en' or 'l'' beginning.
I need it stated explicitly what the rule is, there doesn't appear to be one.
Unlike some comment leavers on this page, I *adore* the passé simple and I find it extremely useful.
That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I enjoy reading French history and literature. (For example, Les Trois mousquetaires is an amazing romp ! Much better in the original French than in any English translation that I've seen.)
I would be hopelessly confused in my reading without a solid understanding of the passé simple (to say nothing of the passé antérieur and *all* the tenses of the subjonctif) !
Different people learn French for different purposes. All the purposes are legitimate, in my view. It's a pretty big website, and I support the principle that the lessons should cover as much of la langue française as possible.
That said, I would be grateful to have more coverage of informal French. When I watch movies, I often find myself at a loss to understand what is being said by one character to another, even though I have a pretty good command of C1-level formal French. Maybe mine is a minority interest, but I just want to mention it.
In any case:
Great site! Many thanks!
Is 'pas' missing because this is spoken French? Or is this a case where it isn't needed?
In the third line of the dialog, if using inversion "Savez-vous à quelle heure nous atterrissons?", the audio in the exercise has several extra words that do not match the text. I can't remember exactly what they were but at the beginning it says "Pascal", like there were cues for the dialog that were being read as the dialog.
Hi, the answer for “Commande en même temps” reads “Commande en même temps, ça ira plus vite !”, giving away the next section, which is “ça ira plus vite !”. Also, this feels more like a A1 than a B1.
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