French language Q&A Forum

When doing the writing tests, I find myself regularly struggling with knowing when to place accents (and regularly second-guessing myself too!).

Are there any rules of thumb to help with this? For example, the 'ô' seems to always appear in words which sound similar in english and one would place an 's': eg hôpital, hôtel, hôte, etc.

I generally have trouble with accented 'e's (ignoring the "obvious" accents, such as when using the passé composé and other conjugation rules) so any advice would be very welcome.

How do I identify a masculine or feminine noun?

Hello,

The lesson says: "In the case of de + [people], the preposition de remains and is followed by a stress pronoun (moi, toi, lui, elle, nous, vous, eux, elles)"

But in the video, there's an example "Vous connaissez des francais?" and the answer is, "Oui, nous en connaissons". Shouldn't it be: "Oui, nous connaissons d'eux"?

Can you also have "Je n'ai pas du tout été surprise"?

Why is does this sentence begin in passe compose when most of the story has been in the imparfait? "J'ai même commencé à prétendre que nous n'étions pas disponibles." 

Hi,

I see here that assez is used to mean "not enough", but doesn't it also mean "that much"? 

Ils n'ont pas assez d'argent. -> Couldn't it also mean that they don't have that much money? Not with the implication that is not enough for a specific purpose, but rather not that much in general.

How to tell them apart?

Il doit être le coup d'œil, non?

Just checking, the number of minutes are written out in full in all the examples - is there ever a situation in French where numerals are written instead? eg 23 instead of vingt-trois.

I found this really hard to follow. I had to repeat each section multiple times to try and figure out what was being said. The person speaks really fast and runs everything together, so words get swallowed in the elisons... I guess with more practice it will come, but maybe on the B2 end of B1?