French language Q&A Forum

Is there any difference in the meaning or tone of “comment ça se fait” compared to “pourquoi”? In English, we sometimes say “how come” rather than “why” to avoid sounding curt or accusatory. Thank you!

Aapparently when turning to take another street or road, one uses the preposition, dans, as in "...tournez à gauche dans la rue Jacques Cartier." But if one continues on this avenue or route, one uses the preposition, sur, as in "...Continuez sur cette route..."  However, then we have "... puis prenez la deuxième à gauche sur l'avenue de la Liberté" where now the preposition, sur, is used in this turn.  So, the prepositions are a bit confusing for us.  Can you give us some advice regarding sur and dans in the context of directions?

is 'Glace aux marrons " acceptable too?  A brief explanation would help.   Thanks

Thomas va chez ___________ oncle (adjectifs possessifs)

I am confused by this example: 

"I haven't left France for three years:" "Je n'ai pas quitté la France depuis trois ans."

The lesson says "we use PC because the negation indicates the action wasn't done during the entirety of that past period. BUT PC is used to express actions which were completed or finished in the past. 

This example shows it WAS NOT completed, so why PC and not imparfait??

Thank you. 

Hello - in the exercise it says:.....on a bu notre café sur la terrasse. 

Further down in the Q&A, White asked about the difference between 'sur la terrasse' and 'en  terrasse'. 

Céline's answer seems to suggest that the exercise above is incorrect. 

Have I understood correctly i.e. saying 'sur la terrasse' implies that something is actually physically on the terrace and so in effect, the extract should read: .... on a bu notre café en terrasse. ( One would assume that they were sitting on chairs on the terrace and not directly on the surface of the terrace as would be the case of a pot plant etc as per Céline's examples.)

If my understanding is correct, should the exercise not be corrected to say 'en terrasse' instead of 'sur la terrasse' ?

It says jusqu'à ce que and subjunctive is for until someone does something so for example 'we kissed until his parents arrived'. But could it also apply to 'we talked until it became too late'? So a second part of the sentence not done by someone but a situation without a person and action.

Isn't "après-midi" masculine, and if so should it not be:

cet après-midi sera consacré

Judging by the comments below and my own experience of this lesson i think it could still be tweaked to improve it.  It think it would be helpful to: 

* add - write out - relevant (new to some) vocabulary for decimals, commas and currencies

* emphasise how the rules for writing numbers in French are the same (or different) when used for currencies vs other contexts

* provide and describe a few more complex examples, including the outliers (eg uncommon use of a decimal point in French), with at least one example of a French number which translates to three or more decimal points in English. The latter would be very useful because it highlights how our Eng/French translation brain can get confused (evident in these discussions) because it looks identical to the English version of numbers in the thousands.