This week we’re consolidating what we’ve learned so far about the subjunctive in French. We’ll categorise the examples we’ve heard so far in the texts of Alf, Katie and Veronica, and Mark will walk you through some further examples including pour que, pourvu que, bien que, and many more. We’ll learn about situations when you use the subjunctive which relate to demands and wishes, and we’ll also cover situations involving opinions and emotions. This episode will help you to get to grips with the French subjunctive and lay the groundwork for further examples in future texts. Please note that lesson 16 of Season 3 was originally known as lesson 316 of Coffee Break French. We have renumbered the lessons of each season as lessons 1-40 to make things more simple for our listeners.
5 thoughts on “Season 3 – Lesson 16 – Coffee Break French – Subjunctive Special!”
In the Members’ version of Lesson 316, and the PDF Lesson Guide, the response to Mark’s question of Conjunctions Example 2 is “Bien que j’aie un frère, je ne LE vois pas souvent”.
I answered “Bien que j’ai un frère, je ne LUI vois pas souvent”.
Is my answer valid, equally valid or incorrect? Please explain.
My question on subjunctive conjunctions relates to the use of ‘lui’ rather than ‘le’ and not to the use of the present indicative “j’ai” rather than the present subjunctive “j’aie” which was a typo!
Hi Dave, I think after bien que we always use subjunctive, so you have to say “bien que j’aie…” and you can use lui when you replace a verb with à, for example: je donne ma voiture à Poul – je lui donne ma voiture. In this case we replace “à Poul” with “lui”. In the sentence above “le” just serve to notice something that was already mentioned – “le frère”. If it was “la soeur” we would use “la”.
OK lesson it crahed once though .may be my browser fault.
I’ve been wondering about the subjunctive for ages, but never really knew how to approach the beast, so to speak. 🙂 This episode was a wonderful introduction at just the right pace. Merci beaucoup! Coffee Break French est sublime. Je voudrais que vous ne nous quittiez jamais…