French language Q&A Forum

In the sentence below the verb emmener is used, however doesn't that give the impression that her mother stayed with her daughter to watch the film? Whereas the english text says that she watched the film with her best friend. Given the context and thinking retrospectively, I guess her mother would have stayed with her to watch it, but it's a little ambiguous (she could have just dropped her off at the cinema).

I used amener instead of emmener, but that wasn't given as an option.

j'avais dû casser les pieds à ma mère pendant des semaines pour qu'elle m'emmène voir "Amélie" avec ma meilleure amie Lola.

Nick

Now, l just have to read Les Fleurs du Mal. So inspiring. The bohemian in me recognizes that in Baudelaire. 

As we encounter these amazing writers, it strikes me that it would be useful to learn the use of the passé simple and the passé antérieur and possibly other now more literary tenses in the subjonctif.  I realize that most people don't speak that way anymore. Yet l wonder, if l were to read Baudelaire, might l  not encounter those tenses? 

Another current example: l listen to France Inter. They recently aired a fabulous 8 part podcast on Simone de Beauvoir. So l am now reading Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, which is liberally sprinkled with the Passé simple and Passé antérieur. So no sweat, l figure it out; the vocabulary she uses is actually more challenging than her tenses. So here is a woman writing in 1958 who is very current today in fact, when it comes to feminism, she is still central source material. Thanks for considering this suggestion.

PS: The funniest thing! After first writing this l  took a study plan test in which 4 out of 10 questions required the passé simple! So my information that you do not teach such tenses is clearly wrong ... or out-dated. Please feel free to not respond to my suggestion if my basic assumptions are wrong 😀

This appeared in a test question on Laura's site.

(If I was rich, I could travel a lot.).

Is this grammatically correct? No!

Shame!!!

Sorry but I don't have accents. Why is it "ressemblent a des ecailles" and not "aux ecailles"?

Hi,

Internet was slow, it took ages for posts to register. At least one of my entries did not register at all. I made only one mistake, 'auparavant" which l spelled with an e (auparavent). Some punctuation challenges. So, l had rated myself  59 out of 60, not 49 out of 60. How do l fix this?

Est-ce que la phrase "à ces heures" a un sens?  Merci.

After all this time learning French l decide today to develop an English/French go-to chart for translation purposes. 

All of a sudden, the conditional tense sitting in the indicative mood in my little Bescherelle conjugaison book looks out of place. Why is it there, in a mood that expresses facts and certainties,  things that definitely happened?

 A little research in Bescherelle, on the web and here surface the fact that the Conditional in French is often classified as a mood unto itself (as in Lawless French) due to it's hypothetical expressions; and that more often, today, "pour des raisons de forme et de sens"(Bescherelle p.140), as a tense under the imperative. An example given for the latter  is that "aurait" , conditional present, equates the future present transposed into the past. So interesting! I had not seen this before. 

I wonder, what went into Lawless French's decision to classify the Conditional  as a mood apart instead of as under the Indicative mood? Either works , l am just curious.

Following on from Frank's question, in the passage:

 "...j'ai noté toutes ces bonnes idées", 

how does one know if it's those (ces) or your (ses) good ideas ?

Could you have "Vous nous accompagnerez la prochaine fois"? as well as "Vous viendrez avec nous.."?

Thanks