Could I have written il nous fallait envoyer les uns les autres des photos par la poste?
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A1 French Writing Challenge
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Translate: “Between neighbours”
Grammar lessons included in A1 exercise
A2 French Writing Challenge
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Translate: “Did you watch “Masterchef”?”
Grammar lessons included in A2 exercise
B1 French Writing Challenge
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Translate: “Every two weeks, I meet up with my friends”
Grammar lessons included in B1 exercise
B2 French Writing Challenge
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Translate: “What do you think of new technologies?”
Grammar lessons included in B2 exercise
C1 French Writing Challenge
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Translate: “Philippe Costamagna, art detective”
Grammar lessons included in C1 exercise
Author info
Aurélie is our resident French Expert. She has created most of the wonderful content you see on the site and is usually the person answering your tricky help questions. She comes from a small village near Chartres in Central France, country of cereal fields and not much else. She left (in a hurry) to study English at the world-famous Sorbonne in Paris, before leaving France in 2007 to experience the “London lifestyle” - and never looked back! She's worked as a professional French teacher, translator and linguist in the UK since. She loves to share her love of languages and is a self-professed cinema and literature geek!
Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.
Comments: 4
Bonjour Jennifer !
You're on the right track, but you still need the reflexive form of 'envoyer' to convey the reciprocity. Using 'les uns... AUX autres' here would be a bit redundant, as such:
'Il nous fallait nous envoyer (les uns aux autres) des photos par la poste.'
The issue here, on top of being a very circumvoluted sentence, is that it tends to accentuates the 'obligation' connotation, which sounds a bit weird when it comes to sending each other pictures ;)
I hope that's helpful!
À bientôt !
The last translation was : "Can't wait till next week". This is a common enough phrase to say , but is there somewhere a French phrasebook that lists all this sort of stuff ? the alternative being to laboriously translate something that is grammatically correct but totally boring ?
I really like the introduction of the art detective Philippe Costamagna in the C1 writing challenge. Will you be developing art investigation stories involving M. Costamagna in the upcoming writing challenges?