French language Q&A Forum

In the follow sentance someone is reporting back what was said to them. 

"donc, au beau milieu de la nuit tu serais allé boire un verre d'eau et tu aurais vu une soucoupe volante dans le jardin, excuse-moi!" 

Why is the conditional being used here instead of the passe compose. And if I were to speak this sentance using the passe compose would it be incorrect. Thanks.

The English text said every six weeks, which would mean once in six weeks right? Should it not be une fois par 6 semaines?

Hi,I'm doing B1 French and I generally understand the use of the subjunctive but got tripped up recently. The first example was " we want someone to guide us".  ..."on veut que quelqu'un nous guide'

Am I right on thinking the subjunctive is guid+e relating to "on" which is 3rd person singular and therefore guide+e. Of course the " on veut que" demands the subjunctive.

In the second example " He wants that we guide him," ( Il veut que nous le guidions), the Subjunctive ending is guid+ions  relating to "nous" which is 1st person plural therefore ends in "ions".

What adds to the confusion is that "on veut" is conjugated like "Il or "elle" but in informal use " on" can mean " we" which is "nous" in French.  I hope I have explained everything well ( and as an aside j'éspere is not a Subjunctive trigger in the affirmative but is in the negative) so you may see why it's so difficult sometimes. Any comments gratefully received.

For some verbs like passer, monter etc there's a rule: 

When a verb is followed immediately by a noun (as opposed to a preposition), it uses avoir as the auxiliary, like most verbs.

But in the book « Les verbes et leurs prépositions » (by Jean-Michel Robert, Isabelle Chollet) there's a note for the verb convenir:

Le verbe convenir se conjugue avec l’auxiliaire avoir lorsqu’il a le sens de « plaire, être appro­prié à », avec l’auxiliaire être lorsqu’il signifie « décider ensemble ».

So I'm confused. What would be the right choice in the following case?

1. La date que vous m’aviez proposée ne m’a pas convenu.

2. La date que vous m’aviez proposée ne m’est pas convenue.

From the one side, here convenir means « plaire, être appro­prié à », therefore it shoud be conjugated with avoir.

From the other side, there's no COD here: "La date" is the subject and "me" is COI, so être should be used.