French language Q&A Forum

- Je n'ai jamais eu un bon sens de l'orientation. 

why not just

Je n'ai jamais eu un bon sens d'orientation

I thought that "Y" cannot be used with regard to people. But  have just been given a correct answer as Il pense à sa famille. Elle y pense aussi. Is family not a unit of people?

Rex reminds Anna of her dog & Rex reminds Anna of his dog

Both appear to translate as Rex rappelle son chien à Anna

What is the best way to avoid this ambiguity?

I notice that 'nul'  is used in the response for 'useless' in the passages yet 'inutile' is accepted as the preferred translation in the explanatory paragraph at the end. Why is this so?

The correct answer involves A-levels - not something your American customers will generally be familiar with. Indeed, I had to look it up. There is by the way no general American equivalent. There are the rare states that offer a high school diploma with extra certification contingent upon an examination.

How can I add an accent mark to "a" when answering what city I am from?

merci

Is there any way to determine whether a sentence should end in a period or an exclamation point? In English, there is generally a difference in the tone of voice: a regular, matter-of-fact tone usually indicates a period, while an excited tone (angry, happy, etc.) usually indicates an exclamation point. For most of the sentences in the dictation exercises, I don't hear anything that lets me determine which one I should choose. In this exercise, the only sentence that seems to me to require an exclamation point is the very last one:  « Miam ! »

I know that intonation in French is different from English, but I just don't grasp how some punctuation works in French.

In what circumstances is AI pronounced as é and not è?

Earlier in the sentence, I understand why it's "de délicates pâquerettes blanches" instead of "des" (because the adj precedes the noun and that causes the plural partitive/indefinite article to change from des to de) but I don't understand why that's been done to the tulips too.  

In this text, "Serviette" qppears to be a beach blanket, though"napkin" is my dictionary definition.  Similarly, "Rayures" are "scratches", "Glaciere"