French language Q&A Forum

Initially I was a bit confused, 
This video helped clear things up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBYVpekmtLI

Is this tense more commonly used in French than in English? I hardly ever speak like this in English and I find it to be a strange tense to learn since it doesn't seem likely that we learners will be reminiscing in French. That seems to be it's only use.

Example: 

Protège d'une muraille épaisse and not 

Par une muraille épaisse

I did have to look this one up! But for anyone else who was wondering, "sans chocolat" is absolutely correct.  I had thought it would be "sans le chocolat."

Hi

The English translation of the sentence "Le jour suivant, Ali Baba retourna à la grotte" is Ali Baba returned to the cave the following day. I don't understand why you used future simple instead of passe compose? Thank you.

I cannot understand at all what the difference is between the phrases below using plaire. It seems to me both are possible but only one is correct according to Kwiziq:

Ce restaurant nous plait  vs  Ce restaurant plait a nous

Please forgive the lack of accents

OK, I spelled 'conduisiez' wrong, but I am puzzled as to the of the expletif 'ne' here.  As I understand it, it has no negative meaning, but how does one know when to use it in these subjunctive clauses?

The lesson says that with ça or cela, the word is after the verb trouve, and when there's an object pronoun le, la, les, etc, the pronoun goes before the verb.  Isn't cela an object pronoun?  Why wouldn't "I find it..."  be translated "Je le trouve..."?
Merci, Craig

An example above :

Cette soirée s'est très bien passée.That evening went very well.
Isn't "that evening" a precise moment (a particular evening) ?