French language Q&A Forum

Why is the letter "l" of the verb s'appeler doubled in all persons but the first and second plural?

Q:''Tom et Paula se sont embrassés devant le miroir.'' can mean:

1.Tom and Paula kissed each other in front of the mirror.

2.Tom and Paula kissed themselves in front of the mirror.

The first correct answer is the normal one, which fits the French sentence. The second one is technically correct, but the only google results of this example that I've found were linguistic works discussing how weird it was. I've asked some English native speakers (who are also familiar with French at various levels), and it is really weird. As a C2 French speaker, I also find this weird, I have never encountered the second meaning. Should we really interpret that sentence also as "Tom was kissing his own hand in front of the mirror and Paula was kissing her own hand in front of the mirror"? In an exercise on the reciprocity expressed by the reflexive verbs?

Wasn't the original intention rather to put there both "Tom and Paula kissed each other in front of the mirror." and "Tom and Paula kissed in front of the mirror"? That would illustrate perfectly the issue at hand, that the reflexive pronoun is used in French and not in the English translation.

What does "en train de" literally mean?

Why is it "Bien qu'il soit actuellement l'astronaute français le plus célèbre...", and not "Bien que ce soit actuellement l'astronaute français le plus célèbre..." ? I thought that you have to use "c'est" (and not "il est") with a noun that has an article and an adjective. 

Can 'suddenly' be translated as 'soudainement'? Reverso seems to think that there is such a word.

Thanks

I understand now that:

In French there is no “like” as in English. Something doesn’t smell like chocolate, it just “smells chocolate”.

So, you would say: Ça sent le chocolat

But how would you say "Who smells chocolate?" 

Qui sent le chocolat ?

Whereas Qu'est-ce qui sent le chocolat is the longer way of saying "What smells like chocolate" 

Is this correct?

Or would you have to say something like: qui peut sentir le chocolat ?

This is in one of the green callout boxes in the lesson: "In this negative structure, you only use de or d' in front of a vowel or mute h." This really confused me when I first read it because it seems to say you shouldn't use either one if there's no vowel/mute h. I think a comma or parens would make it clearer: "In this negative structure, you only use de (or d' in front of a vowel or mute h)."