French language Q&A Forum

If pendant is used to describe past durations with a clear beginning and end, and the imperfect is used to describe continuing actions or habits in the past, why is the example "J'étais là pendant quarante-cinq minutes" instead of "J'ai été là pendant quarante-cinq minutes" since the passé composé is used to describe actions with a clear beginning & end in the past. 

Is there a rule exception for using pendant and l'imparfait?

I'm interested that you translate 'fin de semaine' as 'weekend'. That was what I was taught in school years ago, but French practice now seems to be to call Saturday/Sunday 'le weekend' and for 'fin de semaine' to mean Friday, or just Friday evening.

I was actually looking for a tutorial here, maybe I'm expecting too much...

I'm confused when to substitute use le, la, or y, my test result says "Have you had your coffee yet?"

So the tutorial is:

"You've already learned that the pronoun y is used to mean there (See Y = There (adverbial pronoun)).

Now here is another usage of y."

This pretty much tells me nothing.