I'm currently working on grammar guides to accompany the WJEC A level exercises I'm doing for www.alevelfrench.com. One of the most frustrating things for me was getting everything checked out to make sure the sentence sounded alright to a native speaker. We all know that there is quite a lot of disagreement among them so it is rare that you ever feel 100% "correct". With google (and presumably) other such search engines now offering such an immense corpus of material putting sample sentences into it to check their accuracy is now reasonably safe, judging from my experience.
I was doing some exercises on the use of the passive for my new Alf a mots grammar exercises and wasn't sure of the right constructing for letting off fireworks for le 14 juillet topic. This was quickly revealed as were some other useful passive constructions. Very useful.
My first example comes from an explanation of the passive I tend to use in English. "Oh, I see the washing up hasn't been done yet!" An indirect accusation where the agent is not explicitly mentioned. I put in "la vaisselle est faite" and "la vaisselle a été faite" thinking that that problems sounds very stiff and unusual in French. On googling the La vaisselle a été faite several examples came up from French product review sites particuarly with "La vaisselle n'a pas été faite" from people complaining about the antics of their dishwasher. So presumably you can say it!
Increasingly I guess more or less anything you would want to say or write will be searchable which doesn't really give authority about whether it's a "desirable" thing to put in writing-it just legitimises to the extent that "some French people/say or write it".
If you want to use these dodgily legitimised A level French resources just click here.
I was doing some exercises on the use of the passive for my new Alf a mots grammar exercises and wasn't sure of the right constructing for letting off fireworks for le 14 juillet topic. This was quickly revealed as were some other useful passive constructions. Very useful.
My first example comes from an explanation of the passive I tend to use in English. "Oh, I see the washing up hasn't been done yet!" An indirect accusation where the agent is not explicitly mentioned. I put in "la vaisselle est faite" and "la vaisselle a été faite" thinking that that problems sounds very stiff and unusual in French. On googling the La vaisselle a été faite several examples came up from French product review sites particuarly with "La vaisselle n'a pas été faite" from people complaining about the antics of their dishwasher. So presumably you can say it!
Increasingly I guess more or less anything you would want to say or write will be searchable which doesn't really give authority about whether it's a "desirable" thing to put in writing-it just legitimises to the extent that "some French people/say or write it".
If you want to use these dodgily legitimised A level French resources just click here.
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