French Writing Challenges - week 24

French writing challengesA new set of self-marked weekend writing challenges was sent by email to Premium subscribers.

Once you’ve completed the exercise, there’s a list of grammar topics tested. If you have questions please post them under the most suitable grammar topic (if it’s related to a specific point), or here or on the QandA forum (for general questions). Don’t forget you can add any of the lessons to your notebook(s) and then kwiz against them to strengthen the areas where you discovered you were weak.

Pssst!Pssst! Would you like to write about a particular topic? We’d love some suggestions!

A1 French Writing Challenge

NB: Click the link sent to you by email to do this challenge!
Translate:
“Between neighbours”
Grammar lessons included in A1 exercise

A2 French Writing Challenge

NB: Click the link sent to you by email to do this challenge!
Translate:
“Did you watch “Masterchef”?”
Grammar lessons included in A2 exercise

B1 French Writing Challenge

NB: Click the link sent to you by email to do this challenge!
Translate:
“Every two weeks, I meet up with my friends”
Grammar lessons included in B1 exercise

B2 French Writing Challenge

NB: Click the link sent to you by email to do this challenge!
Translate:
“What do you think of new technologies?”
Grammar lessons included in B2 exercise

C1 French Writing Challenge

NB: Click the link sent to you by email to do this challenge!
Translate:
“Philippe Costamagna, art detective”
Grammar lessons included in C1 exercise

Author info

Aurélie Drouard

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 K Lawless

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

Could I have written il nous fallait envoyer les uns les autres des photos par la poste?

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 ?

Ha

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?