French · Chapter 16 · Lesson 4 · Grammar primer
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Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
French hedges the news with a tense
Where English writes allegedly or reportedly, the French press simply shifts into the conditional. Le président aurait démissionné does not mean he would resign; it means someone claims he has. Read Le Monde without spotting this and you miss the most important hedge in the article.
Le président aurait démissionné.
Faire plus infinitive does your dirty work
Faire plus an infinitive means having something done: je fais réparer ma voiture, il a fait construire une maison. English needs have, get or make plus a verb, and the French is tighter. One fixed detail: pronouns go in front of faire, never in front of the infinitive.
Je le fais réparer.
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.
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26-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 4 of 5 in this chapter