French language Q&A Forum

When I look up "failli" in Google translate, it has "bankrupt." Yet the words "failli sursauter" translate as "almost startled" (comme "presque sursauter).

So it kind of means "You failed to be startled"? (Failli faire, mais no?) Wow... that's a stretch.

Is the meaning of "presque" (almost) slightly different then? 

In the following sentence - C'est ma sœur., c'est is not followed by un/une/la/le/les then why cant we use elle est?

How do you know the y in the beginning of a word is being used as a vowel or consonant?? 

Sorry to open this one up again !

But why not translate as:

"Cécile va et prend..." ?

In this exercise, which asked to conjugate verbs in Plus-que-parfait, I wrote the following sentence: Marc lui avait souri et Gilles avait deviné tout de suite que Marc avait capturé son âme!  My « avait capturé » was marked down and corrected to be « avaient capturé ».  I cannot understand why a 3rd person plural conjugation is being used here instead of singular since the sentence talks about one person, Marc, who caught/captured Gilles’s soul.

I just wondered if we have to use C'était un bâtarde rather then il était because Pip was not a human being

The see examples are written in English, not French, even in the test. It looks like this page needs editing!

I have a question in these two sentences: 1. Tu ne me le donnes pas. 2. Tu ne la lui écris pas. What is the correct order of indirect pronoun and object pronoun? In the first sentence, it seems that the order is indirect(me) + object(le), but in the second one, it becomes object(la) + indirect(lui). Is there anything wrong here? Or both are correct, that this order doesn’t matter?