Activity on the French forum

Lots of interesting questions (and answers!) on the French forum today and yesterday -- keep it up!

French Forum prizes: survey

I am currently conducting a survey to find out your opinion on introducing prizes for the best questions and answers posted on the French Forum. Over 2,000 people either use or have passed through the forum, and so I would like to try and encourage a bit more participation. Your opinions will be gratefully received!

23 July 2011: This week on the forum

Well, things are pretty much winding down for the summer holidays, so there is a little bit less activity on the French forum. People are naturally thinking more about their sun tan lotion and bathers right now than their French verb conjugations. For that reason, I'm going to cheat slightly in this summary and mention a couple of posts from actually just over a week ago.

One interesting question always liable to lead to sub-questions was on the use of the French preposition 'de'. Like various French prepositions, 'de' has special status as it is used pre-infinitivally, and because in some cases it is arguably used as a 'case marker' rather than a preposition as such.

Another almots equally vital topic was of playground nomenclature. As a UK speaker, I confess I'm still not entirely sure what a "teeter totter" actually is.

Issues of tense usage commonly cause problems, as evidenced in this interesting question touching on tense usage and the subjunctive in French. A particular issue highlighted by this question is that in different languages, elements of a sentence such as "pastness" may actually be encoded in different parts of the sentence: there isn't always a one-to-one correspondence between e.g. which part of the sentence is in the past tense and which in the present, even though overall, the sentences convey a similar meaning.

Your questions about French language and culture are always welcome on the forum. I know you're probably too busy packing your bucket and spade to be worrying about weighty matters of subjunctive usage, but at least some of us will still be around!

Thank you to forum members!

There's been an excellent mix of questions/answers on the French language forum this week -- thanks to all you have contributed!

Over 2,000 members on French forum

This actually passed me by, but a few days ago we apparently reached 2,000 members on the French forum. Now obviously, I realise that nowhere near all of these are active members (though it's always good to see our growing stock of regular posters). But nontheless, it is some kind of milestone of how many people have "stopped off" at the forum to have their questions answered about French language and culture. Many thanks to al!

French forum: "follow thread" feature enabled

A change has been made to the gubbinry of the French Language forum that means that the "Follow" option should work in many cases where it didn't before. When you ask a question or get involved in a discussion on the forum, you may wish to click on the "Follow" button at the bottom of the page. You will then receive an e-mail when a new post is made to that thread, be it a response to your question or a continuation of the thread.