French language Q&A Forum

Why do you use “je chantais” instead of “j’ai chanté” after “Hier, en allant au travail? You mention that this happened yesterday, so it is a completed action in the past. 

Hi, Do you have a list of verbs that are followed by à and de? And is there a simple way to remember which is the right preposition to be used post which verb?

In the passage 'n'avait pas quitté le coin du feu de toute la semaine' why is there a de before 'toute la semaine'?

The text reads “Tant mieux, car je n'ai même pas encore commencé à râper le fromage”, but there’s no “même” spoken in the audio (Cécile has confirmed this to be the case in the Q&A). 

The text just needs a small correction. 

Is there a spelling error in the following?

Après s'être rasé la tête, Carl se sentit mieux.

Carl se sentAIT mieux

John M

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.  

Taking Maarten’s sentence as a starting point “When 'on' can be replaced by the specific subject pronoun 'nous', adjectives agree with number and are therefore plural (only the past participle/adjective, not the auxiliary verb conjugation).”

My question is, assuming that we have decided to indeed follow the agreement rule, if the specific group that “on” refers to were all female, would the sentence then be “On était éberluées”? I.e. does the gender get reflected in the adjective in the same way that it would if we used “nous” and the group were all female (“nous étions éberluées”).

I used navré instead of désolé in this exercise. Is it fine?

Thank you

Can you say "je n'ai pas encore reçu" instead of "je n'ai toujours pas reçu"?

Also, can you say "il m'a fallu frapper à chaque porte"?

Bonjour Kwiziq Team,

I completed a question on your website: Aurélie ________ avec sa soeur.

I was trying to decide if it should be "s'est disputée" or "s'est disputé". I thought it would've been the former, since Aurélie is a girl. But I remembered stumbling upon an article about Le cas de non-accord which said:

Le participe passé ne s'accorde pas lorsque le C.O.D. suit le verbe.
Exemples :
- Ils se sont lavé les mains. (COD "les mains" placé après le verbe)
- Ils se sont écrit des lettres. (COD "des lettres" placé après le verbe)
- Ils se sont réparti tous les billets. (COD "tous les billets" placé après le verbe)

Hence, I selected "s'est disputé"" which turned out to be the wrong answer. Can someone explain why? Is it because "sa soeur" is not a C.O.D. and if so, why not?

Thanks very much for all you do!