At the ticket office: depuis, il y a, and spoken politeness
In the oral component, Nadia is given a role-play card. She is at the ticket office in Avignon, wants a same-day return ticket to Marseille, holds a student card and is travelling with a bicycle. The examiner plays the clerk and says: 'Le train de 14h07 est complet, mais il y a une correspondance à Miramas, avec vingt minutes d'attente.' Nadia's rehearsed lines are: 'J'attends le train il y a deux heures', 'Je veux un billet aller-retour', 'Depuis que je suis arrivée, je cherche la gare', and she plans to ask 'Est-ce que le train est en retard?' The examiner is instructed to interrupt once with a problem - the bicycle - and to mark grammar, range and interaction. Nadia has been told that hesitating and self-correcting is acceptable, but that a memorised script delivered without reacting to the clerk will lose interaction marks.
1. Nadia's first line is wrong. Correct it in two different ways and explain what each version implies about the situation.
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Version 1: J'attends le train depuis deux heures. Depuis + present describes an action begun in the past and still going on, which is exactly her situation: she is still waiting. The present tense is correct in French where English uses a perfect ('I have been waiting for two hours').
Version 2: J'ai attendu le train pendant deux heures. Here the waiting is presented as a completed block of time, with pendant marking duration. This implies she has stopped waiting or is summing up, so it fits only if the wait is over.
What she must not say is il y a deux heures with the present: J'attends le train il y a deux heures means 'I am waiting for the train two hours ago', which is incoherent. Il y a + duration points back to a moment in time and requires a past tense: Je suis arrivée il y a deux heures ('I arrived two hours ago') - which is a good sentence, just a different one. The choice is therefore between depuis + present (still true) and il y a + past (a dated event).
2. 'Je veux un billet' or 'Je voudrais un billet'? Decide, and explain what else besides the verb carries politeness in a spoken request.
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Je voudrais is the right choice. The conditional softens the request; je veux states a wish as a fact and, to a stranger behind a counter, sounds like a demand. This is not a trivial nicety: in an oral exam it is one of the first things a marker notices, and in real life it sets the tone of the whole exchange.
But politeness in spoken French is not carried by the verb alone. Three other features matter:
- An opening greeting before the request: Bonjour, je voudrais… - omitting bonjour is the single most common failure in role plays.
- A conditional frame around the whole utterance: Est-ce que vous auriez un billet aller-retour pour Marseille ? or Serait-il possible d'avoir…, which is more deferential than a plain question.
- A closing thank-you that acknowledges the effort: Merci beaucoup, c'est gentil.
So the model line is not just Je voudrais un aller-retour pour Marseille, s'il vous plaît but a sequence: greeting, softened request, thanks. The s'il vous plaît alone, tacked onto je veux, repairs nothing.
3. The clerk says there is 'une correspondance à Miramas'. What does Nadia need to find out, and give two questions she could ask, one using inversion and one using 'est-ce que'.
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Une correspondance is a connection, not a delay or a replacement bus: she must change trains at Miramas. What she needs to know is (a) whether the connection is guaranteed and how long she has, (b) which platform, and (c) whether the bicycle is allowed on the second train. Missing (a) or (c) is the realistic trap: twenty minutes can be tight with a bike.
Inversion: À quelle heure part le train suivant pour Marseille, et de quel quai ? - information questions with inversion sound more formal and are useful when the examiner is playing a brisk official.
Est-ce que: Est-ce que je dois changer de quai à Miramas, et est-ce que le vélo est accepté dans le train suivant ? - the second est-ce que can be dropped in speech (et le vélo, il est accepté ?), which shows interaction rather than recitation.
She should also confirm the fare, since she has a student card: Est-ce que la carte étudiante s'applique aussi au trajet Avignon–Miramas ? Reacting to the clerk's information is what earns interaction marks.