What's your bête noire of French grammar?

[Neil Coffey]

Dear all,

I'm looking to expand the site's French grammar section so am looking for suggestions of new topics to include. So in a nutshell my question is:

What are the things that you find difficult/confusing about French?!

[sudeh sabourian]

speaking french as poeple speak in France.

[Ed la mouette]

You mean, incorrectly ? :D

[Rajalakshmi Iyengar]

J'ai eu beaucoup de betes noires en francais.....je veux apprendre tous les sens pour le verbe "Faire" et je veux savoir si il ya un site pour donner toutes les conjugaisons de tous les temps pour chaque verbe........pouvez-vous m'aider?......But please do it in English not French...........please

[Ed la mouette]

Do it in english ? Ca va pas, non ? On est ici pour parler français !

Voilà ton trésor : www.leconjugueur.com

[Neil Coffey]

As with all verbs, this site's dictionary entry for faire has the conjugation of the most used tenses, and a link to a full verb table in case you need to see the conjugations of other tenses.

[Rajalakshmi Iyengar]

Thanks Neil.....I guess I should go through this whole site first and then ask questions....It is unfair to ask questions and waste your time if the answers are already available in the site. And Ed....Je sais nous sommes ici pour parler Francais, mais je ne comprends pas toutes les choses que vous dites toujours.

[Roman Alvan]

Thank you for give us the opportunity to share the doubts and also to learn more french. Im trying to do my best to learn and i think this was give me the possibility to overcome confussions like i had with "leur" and the clitiques. By the way, Which is the etymology of the term "clitique"? Thank you for your reply and greetings for you Neil and to all

[Erwan]

Hello,

It seems that "clitique" comes from the english word clitic (http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/clitique).

I didn't find it in my dictionnaries and have many difficulties to find the eymology on internet (only one article). So, I hope that this answer is good.

 

 

[Neil Coffey]

What appears to have happened is that there already existed the word "enclitic" (French "enclitique"),based on the Latin word "encliticus" (which itself was a loan from Greek). This word appears to have been coined a good 500 years or so ago.

 

Then more recently, the word "clitic" was coined from "enclitic". This type of coining is sometimes called a "back formation", i.e. you take a word that looks as though it is made up of a prefix (or suffix etc) plus another word, and "remove" the prefix. It's similar to how we get "burger" from "Hamburger".

 

I'm not just sure when "clitique" started being used in French-- whether it was more or less around the time of the coining of English "clitic" or if it was much later (the Wiktionary entry suggests later, but they don't cite any source).

 

Of course, this is just the first *attested* use of "clitic" as far as we can see. It supposes that originally, people only thought of using "enclitic", and for a period of around 450 years, nobody in the universe thought to derive "clitic" from "enclitic"...

[carrie-lee]

Relative pronouns!   For example, when to use duquel vs dont. 

Thank you!

[Peter Wouters]

Sans doute, la bête la "plus noire", c'est le subjonctif. Pas seulement la formation, mais plutôt l'utilisation et les nuances...

[Erwan]

Tu trouveras des éléments intéressants ici : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjonctif et également ici http://www.xtec.es/~sgirona/fle/subjonctif_index.htm

Je reconnais que ma réponse est un peu facile :-)

Le subjonctif est également la bête noire de beaucoup d'élèves français.