My knowledge of grammar is average at best nowadays (maybe a bit above that as I was really good in French at school, read a lot, and had a few extra years of French courses due to my field of study, but I'm nowhere near as good as anyone I know who writes professionally on a regular or semi-regular basis - from journalists to any decent secretary for example). If I write anything formally, I often have to bring the grammar out and check a few things to be sure (mind you, it's common for French people to do that. At some point I was looking for the English equivalent of our grammars, and I was rather surprised to see the closest the bookstores had to recommend me for common use and that wasn't for linguists was usage books like Fowler's, or books specifically about verbs). If I'm rushed, I fairly often will substitute a verb for another because I hesitate over the proper silent termination.

Conjugation is easier, because all the basic tenses are intuitive to native speakers (though you'll hear native speakers make mistakes in spoken French, one of the most common one is forgetting if a verb ought to be built with avoir or être). If you want to test my limits though, ask mesomething about the uncommon, archaic or alternative form tenses... which we studied like the rest, but that I have more than a little forgotten... passé du conditionel deuxième forme and stuff like that (eg: j'eusse étudié) or imparfait du subjonctif (que j'étudiasse). I can use them in speech (where they're barely used) with caution and I recognize and understand them when I read them, but I need to check them to write most of them.


French grammar is a bitch, with a lot of archaic and "illogical" rules that remind me a bit of the poor state of English spelling (unlike French spelling, which like other languages' in Europe has been normalized/simplified, while in English that still havr to happen, with their many extraneous letters and different ways to spell the same sounds that depend on older forms very often not even known by the average native speaker - and all their regional variations... favour and favor and so on). French grammar is similarly full of exceptions inherited from the past that aren't relevant in any way anymore (of course language lovers have a fetichist compulsive fondness for these old fossils, which mostly just get in the way of communicating, if you ask me. They belong in books about language rather than in modern grammar. Nothing wrong in learning old French, but insisting to spell hiboux instead of hibous because of an old French form is more a phallacy and a justification for the Académie française than anything else, as until the Baroque age, French (like English of the time) was written any which way the writer thought it should be written...).. We lose a massive amount of time as kids just learning all those rules by rote with no more explanation than "it's how it is".

Then when you read about the history of the language, you start learning that this grammatical (or lexical) exception is an odd leftover from low latin that stuck because the level of language it belongs to was mostly used for a long time by savants or priests who revelled in their etymologies and exceptions, or that, for instance, weird exceptions like "l'accord du participe passé avec le verbe avoir se fait seulement si le complément d'objet direct est placé devant le verbe" exist because medieval copists would otherwise have been slowed down, or might have made mistakes, if they had to read ahead just to know if they should put a femine or plural there. Very relevant exception in the days of word processors...

Of course we are also stuck with tons of non-sensical feminine and plural forms inherited from latin-like cases in old French, which we have to memorize with mnemonic tricks (eg: which words in ou are plurialized with x instead of s, which words in -al turn to -aux etc). Irregular verbs aren't nearly as bad as English's, but still.


I thought the same thing about "seulement" sounding better, but figured that "juste" wasn't really wrong, so no need to correct it. That's a matter of how strict one is in correcting, I suppose.

You forced me to check in my French historical dictionary and Fowler's for this

The way you used juste is bordering "anglicisme" but isn't one (it would have been one if you had said "pour juste deux ans, a copy of "for just". The more proper/common way to use the adverb in French is still in the sense of precisely/exactly ("Ça fait juste un an aujourd'hui que...". In familiar speech (and now in writing) the sense of seulement is accepted (even in dictionaries, Larousse has it without any restrictions note, the historical Robert has reservations on that use), but most French people would have used seulement in your sentence. One of the senses of the adjective is "too short", so by extension we tend to use the adverb to mean "only" more often for very short durations, or when there's a feeling of urgency: "juste deux minutes"/"j'ai eu juste deux heures pour finir". I think perhaps English might have favoured "only" over "just" in the original sentence too. There's something in either languages that associates just with short/tight.