French language Q&A Forum

This is a sample sentence from this lesson: 

J'ai de plus en plus de mal à me concentrer.

I understand the more and more part.  As a student, without the translation, I would not have come up with I'm struggling more and more to focus.   I was seeing this as ... I have (more and more) pain myself to concentrate.  Is there a lesson on avoir mal a that talks about struggling?  If so J'ai de plus en plus de mal avec cette example! :)

Checking whether these words are interchangeable, or whether there are nuances we should know about:

Parfois vs quelquefois 

mare vs. étang vs bassin 

morceaux de tomate vs pièces de tomate

Thanks!

Hey,

why is it "et elle détestait particulièrement être le centre de l'attention."

Collins Robert Dictionary and other online sources all say "le centre d'attention"

The de/de la/d'/du is always confusing.

L’imparfait - what a minefield ! It’s not a question, but i’ve found that when it’s used to express habits or repeated actions more sense is made in the English when ‘would’ is used over ‘used to’ - which indeed you’ve noted in your lesson. This has helped me understand its use in French.

So a sentence like “Je lisais tous les jours” could be translated as “I would / used to read every day”

Are you saying qui can’t be used unless it’s in the inverted form? Here’s the lesson question and I used qui vs qui est-ce que: Qui vous avez envie de revoir ? I know you can’t use the longer version with inverted questions. Thanks for your help.