French language Q&A Forum

hi,

After reviewing the positions of adjectives is it correct to say that the sentence un extremement vieux parchemin would fall under the category for 2 or more syllables for the word extremement?

merci

nicole

Bonjour, should "Tous les parents la redoute" read "Tous les parents la redoutent" ? Merci, Matthew.

I always understood "le conditionnel présent" to mean "could," but here you're indicating that it means "would," which has a completely different meaning.  Is that just true with "aller" or how do you tell when it's could or would?

Hi,

In this lesson, we use Elle est à New York to say She is in New York

But in another lesson, we use J'habite dans le New Jersey to say I live in New Jersey

Now I am a bit confused about the use of dans le and à with cities. Help!

This may be a little arcane, but what is the general naming convention in French when using proper names from other languages that use the Latin/Roman alphabet, especially for famous persons? For example, in this exercise Leonardo Da Vinci is rendered in the French Léonard de Vinci. The Italian spelling seems to be widely used & in the States at least there has been a move towards using the native spelling of names in academic works & history books.

In English calling him Leonard from Vinci would sound really weird.  

I've been struggling with this lesson for a while now and keep getting the answers wrong in tests.  I think I have it now but the additional research I've had to do suggests there are issues with this lesson. 

(1) The heading is a bit misleading, causing me to think for a long time that "if" made the phrase conditional,  whereas of course it's "would" that does that.  This caused me to think the phrase order was "Si [le conditionnel] (then) [L'imparfait]", whereas it's the opposite for most of the examples. The true order, I realise know, is "Si [l'imparfait] (then) [le conditionnel]", or "[le conditionnel], si [l'imparfait]".

(2) More importantly, the lesson does not mention that the tense of the "if" phrase can vary depending on the likelihood of the "result" phrase. This lesson is focused only on the unlikely outcome and does not discuss or even mention the likely or impossible outcomes as far as I can see.  Is there a reason for this? 

The official name uses the hyphenated form < la Croix-Rouge > (this was 'corrected' to the non hyphenated form on the answers)

https://www.fondation-croix-rouge.fr/la-fondation/qui-sommes-nous/

1-  I am unsure of when to use "personnes" and when to use "gens."  I had, "Disons une trentaine de gens."

2-  Why is it "Ma mère adore le fruit de la passion et l'ananas"  with the definite article but "...mais les enfants préféreraient du chocolat"  ?

I thought this was a general opinion and therefore chose the definite article "le" for "chocolat," as well.

Why is it that when you want to say new before the consonants, you say 'nouveau' but when you want to say new hotel, you say "nouvel hotel" because 'h' is a not a vowel