French language Q&A Forum

Hello,

I'm sorry if this has already been spoken about (I have had a look but there is so much on this subject). I was asked the question in the main quiz "________ de tout mon cœur." - Now I thought as it is so deeply expressed and the "note" section in the topic states "NOTE that you can also use the verb adorer to emphasise love of something or someone", I would use "J'adore Sarah". However, I was marked wrong and should have been "J'aime Sarah". So I find the note section misleading. Maybe that should be expressed differently?

Cheers

Martin

Great dictée, interesting, with food for thought.

I continue to find punctuation challenging, as the speaker's voice does not always indicate what follows etc. 

An example from this dictée: It opens with "Bonjour" followed by - to me - a long silence in which l imagine the speaker connecting with the audience and then, "Aujourd'hui..." So  l wrote "Bonjour! Aujourd'hui ..." whereas Kwiziq is programmed for "Bonjour, aujourd'hui ...".

I no longer deduct for punctuation such as commas, exclamation marks  and full stops and wonder whether naming at least these could be considered. Thanks!

I needed to research these expressions.

I want to translate the following into French:

When I had signed the letter, Maurice mailed it.

I would write this:  "Quand j'avais signé la lettre, Maurice l'a envoyée."

What I want to do is avoid the pluperfect in the subordinate clause. l reached for the usual stand-by "Après avoir/être + past participe" but that will not work here, as there are two subjects (I have always used "Après avoir ..." in the context of there otherwise being one subject) and "Après avoir signé la lettre, Maurice l'a envoyée" means "After having signed the letter, Maurice mailed it" but it also means that Maurice both signed it and mailed it.

 That is inescapable because "Après avoir/être ...", a hanging participle/dangling modifier, lacks a subject, which is provided in a sentence by the first noun in the main clause, thus there is no doubt as to who signed it - it's Maurice because of the operation of that principle. (At least, that's the case in English; if French is somehow different, please tell me.) 

I then tried "Après que ..." but I still end up with the pluperfect because inescapably the signing of the letter is complete and precedes the posting of it by Maurice.  Then I thought to use the passive, but that seems generally to be anathema to the French and it is really clumsy to try it here.  Then I thought to change the exact English formulation of the sentence and use "J'ai signé la lettre et puis Maurice l'a envoyée" but I don't think that that helps (nor is it correct). The signing precedes and is complete before Maurice's action and I keep ending up with the obvious - passé composé for Maurice's action and plus-que-parfait for the action that preceded it (signing).

On reflection, I suspect that I can only resort to the passive to solve this problem:

Maurice a envoyé la lettre qui avait été signé par moi.

(It doesn't matter to me that the passive is anathema to the French; this is just part of a grammar exercise.)

Do you think that that is correct or am I missing something in my quest?

Any solution please, other than the passive, to re-write the original in a way that avoids using the pluperfect in the subordinate clause?

"It is green" still gets "il est vert" marked wrong, despite the fact that it appears to refer to a specific item (as opposed to using "c'est vert," the preferred answer, which would indicate something more general--despite no indication of such in the sentence). Tired of having my score set back (I had to use up most of my free quizzes for the month to make up for this). Please fix. Would also be nice to have the "report it" button on the page that people seem to say exists but which I have never seen.

https://french.kwiziq.com/my-languages/french/tests/results/15218594/system