French · Chapter 10 · Lesson 10 · Grammar primer
Conditional
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Je voudrais is the politeness layer
The conditionnel is what stops you sounding blunt in a French shop. Je veux un café is grammatical and brusque; je voudrais un café is what people actually say. Same move with pouvoir, where pouvez-vous becomes pourriez-vous, and with devoir, which turns must into should.
Pourriez-vous me dire où est la gare?
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 4 min readPractice
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24-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 10 of 10 in this chapter