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14,005 questions • 30,299 answers • 875,493 learners
Questions answered by our learning community with help from expert French teachers
14,005 questions • 30,299 answers • 875,493 learners
I've always been confused by this: "j'aurai du" translates as "I should have" and not as "I will have had to...." but these are not quite the same, I think. "I will have had to catch the 22 bus" suggests that I did catch that particular bus, to achieve whatever, whereas "I should have" suggests that I didn't catch that bus, and perhaps failed in my intention. Similarly for "j'aurai pu" - "I could have" not "I will have been able".
Any advice/explanation appreciated!
Can you give me some idea of the relative strength of these? I was showing an apartment (I'm a broker) and the French client used "j'adore" to refer to the countertops... which confused me. To an English speaker, "adore" seems like a cognate, but in English we generally wouldn't say "I adore these countertops" -- that would likely come across as either 1) over-the-top or 2) sarcastic.
Does "j'adore" better translate as "I really like" or "I think these are cool/great"? And is it equal in strength to "j'aime"?
An acronym that I like to use is BANGS, which stands for beauty, age, numbers, good/bad, and size.
Adjective relating to these categories usually come before the noun. If you compare this to the list of adjective in the lesson above, you'll see a lot of them fit.
For some reason I can't reply to a specific response, so I'll have to post this as a seperate comment.
This is a follow up question to Laura's translation of "She ought to really stop seeing him", which she wrote as "Elle devrait vraiment arreter de le voir." I'm wondering if the phrase "Elle devrait vraiment s'arreter de le voir" is also acceptable.
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