One of the most common questions from French students is, "How can I perfect my French accent?" Like many language learning questions, this one doesn't have a simple answer.
There's a bit of debate with regard to accents on capital letters. Most everyone agrees that accents are required on lower case letters, but some French speakers claim that they are unneccessary or even incorrect on capital letters. Is this true? The answer depends in part on who you ask.
Some French accents offer pronunciation clues, others refer back to old spellings, and still others differentiate between otherwise identically spelled words. For all of these reasons, accents matter and must be included when writing (or typing) in French - especially in the case of words that have different meanings with and without accents.
By definition, adjectives modify nouns. But more than 30 French adjectives can sometimes modify verbs instead, thus taking on the role and characteristics of adverbs, including the fact that they are invariable.
When describing someone as capable of doing or determined to do something, a preposition is required between the adjective and verb. In French, the choice of preposition depends on the adjective that precedes it, not the verb that follows.
Some French verbs do not allow their indirect objects to be replaced by pronouns; instead, the preposition must be maintained after the verb along with the indirect object.
As you might guess from their name, adverbial pronouns are caught between two worlds: they are pronouns in the sense that they replace nouns, and at the same time they are adverbs representing a place, a quantity, or the object of a proposition. French has two adverbial pronouns: en and y.
One of the confusing things for beginning French students is that age is expressed with avoir (to have), rather than être (to be). French also has nouns and adjectives for a person whose age falls within a specific decade.
Grammatical agreement is a vast topic - and one of the banes of French students. While in English we have a few pronouns and adjectives that indicate gender and number (e.g., he/him/his and she/her/hers), in French, agreement is found in 5 of the 8 parts of speech.
Most French verbs are conjugated with avoir as their auxiliary verb in compound tenses and moods, and therefore do not require agreement with their subjects. But avoir verbs do need agreement in a very specific construction: the past participle must agree with the direct object when it precedes the verb.
All pronominal verbs are être verbs in compound tenses and moods like the passé composé, which means that the past participles must agree with their subjects - at least in theory. In fact, it's not quite so straightforward.