French language Q&A Forum

The proper use of prepositions is quirky and hard to master.  In the Lumberjack Part 1 writing exercise, the phrase in English is, "he was filling up his sleigh with branches".  I thought "avec" was too literal and did not sound "French".  I wrote, "Il remplissait son traîneau des branches" because "de" can mean "with" and there were multiple branches.

The correct answers are: "remplissait avec des branches" or "remplissait de branches". 

Can someone please explain why "de" becomes the plural "des" after "avec" but is the singular "de" when used alone?  Thanks.

PS - I think a unit devoted just to the quirks of prepositions would be helpful as well as a vocabulary unit with all the everyday idioms that use etre, avoir, pouvoir, faire, mettre, tenir together with y or en in sentences like "je n'y suis pour rien" or "je n'en peux plus."  It's the little simple words that sound the most "French" but are also the most difficult to master.  Thanks again.

I asked about this previously and I am still confused.

I did a quiz before and it asked how you would ask "what is this" or something to that effect. And it didn't accept "quelle est..." as the correct answer.

The answer I had received is that quelle needs to be followed by a noun. However, previously, my French teachers would say questions like "Quelle est la date?", so I was very confused. Is that phrase incorrect?

Furthermore, I was doing another quiz and got this question:

Quel est le nom ___ restaurant ?

And I was confused why you could ask "what is the name of the restaurant" and use "quel est" and not "qu'est-ce que c'est" or "c'est quoi".

Basically, I'm not understanding if/when you can use "quel est.." or "quelle est..".

Thank you!

Don’t you just use le weekend? Do the french say “le fin de semaine”? 

Is there any logic why jusque is sometimes followed by à and sometimes not? Like here it's jusque-là but otherwise you've got something like jusqu'à maintenant...?