French language Q&A Forum

In my A0 entry test, there was a question to see if "un canapé rectangulaire" is correct or not. The answer was not but I wonder why? 

So Mexique, Cambodge, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Belize are masculine although they end in -e; Qubec, Texas and New Mexico are countries but California is not. It's le Merseyside but not le Bordeaux. Turkey is outside Europe (not entirely I think) and a turkey is from India. You really couldn't make up something more ridiculous than this if you tried. 

I felt I was making good progress with this course but now I am bogged down with endless questions about places that don't interest me and loosing the will to live. I accept that fluent french speakers may need this but I can barely conjugate faire yet, surely this content should be moved to C1?

I am going to write myself out a big crib sheet and cheat - hopefully I can convince the quizzbot I know this stuff so I can move on to something more useful.

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

It is the other way round, I think.

I have a question about the following quiz question:

Elle pardonne à Paul et elle _________

The translation was "She forgives Paul and she forgives us"

The correct answer was "nous pardonne"

I am confused why the first part is "pardonne à Paul" but the second part has the pronoun in front of the verb, "nous pardonne". Is there a general rule to follow for this placement?

I wrote vous êtes cachés and it was caché, but there was no indication that the vous was singular. I could have guessed that only one person was hiding, but it wasn’t clear so I went with the rule. Please make situations like this more explicit so we don’t get marked down for it. Thanks so much!

J'ai acheté deux paires de chaussures, mais ________ me va.

I wrote "ni l'un ni l'autre ne", but it was rejected. It says it's "ni l'une ni l'autre ne". Now, I understand we're talking about PAIRS of shoes, not just shoes, and "un pair" is masculine. So is this an error?

Is there a list of all of the adjectives that go before the noun?  I feel like there is a list somewhere that I am missing.

1). You are all doing your homework (you, all of you, are doing your homeworks, not a single person doing other things) --> tous works on vous

2). You are doing all your homeworks (and not missing any homework from any subject) --> tous works on devoirs

This isn't covered in fully in the lessons, but I would like to know: how do we know when to use à + verb as opposed to de + verb? Some lessons cover de + verb, for example to say 'before running' I can say 'avant de courir'. But I'm not sure about the other case, à + verb. Any answers? I haven't had much luck searching the web for this, so any help would be much appreciated.

This is the one specific to this exercise:

"qui consiste à appliquer de la peinture sur de l'eau". Why not "qui consiste d'appliquer ...?"

Here are other cases I've found on this website:

nous avons commencé à le faire il y a quelques années

quand tu auras fini de ranger ta chambre, tu m'aideras à faire la vaisselle.

on est toujours pressé d'oublier les moments délicats

le temps que je finisse de manger, ... j'aurai fini de vérifier ... le temps que ça lui prend de se préparer