French language Q&A Forum

In the exercise entitled "A Book Lover," there is a phrase "...rien qu'en observant ses grands frères et sœurs." When I gave exactly that spelling, the s's at the end of "frère-" and "sœur-" were marked as incorrect...even though they were present in the correct example, and the narrator gave us a very clear clue that the words were plural by the way she pronounced "ses."  Just letting you know about this glitch in the program. 

Also, I frequently find myself needing a 2nd or 3rd listen to be certain about certain words. Sometimes I'm able to get the program to repeat the recording, often not; when I do, I often need to click on the audio button multiple times before it complies. Either I'm trying to cheat, or the function allowing us to hear the phrase over again doesn't work very well. Please let me know which is the case!

Otherwise, I'm enjoying these challenges very much!

In this exercise, we could use faire face à qqch and affronter to express face something, and what about envisager? 

Could we use this verb to express the same meaning? 

Thank you.

I do not understand why in the above sentence écrit (pp of écrire?) has an 'extra' e. I understand this only applies to être verbs + avoir if object preceeds verb?

John M

I don’t understand why this translates in the present as well as in the historic past?

I know there are lots of exceptions in French! Is there one hiding behind the breaking of the symmetry of taking off two letters and adding one when forming participles (-er > -é, -ir > -i, but -dre > -du, rather than the simpler -re > -u) ?

In the test, I got the following question

"Elle a mangé tout le gâteau !" means:

- She is eating all the cake!

- She ate all the cake!

- She is going to eat all the cake!

- She has eaten all the cake!

- She had eaten eat all the cake!

Could you please explain why we you believe 'she has eaten all the cake' is correct but not 'she had eaten all the cake'? How would we say she had eaten all the cake in French and why is this not passé composé?

Bonjour, why is it not 'nous sommes arrivées'? I put an extra 'e' because Marie is a female.