French language Q&A Forum

Dear all, 

In an exercise in a lesson I was doing on I came across the phrase “How were your holidays?” or “How did your holidays go”. I had to review the lessons on forming questions by inversion in the présent and passé composé with reflexive verbs, and based on what I found there, I decided that if the affirmative is “Elles se sont bien passées” / “Tes vacances sont bien passées”, the question would be “Comment se sont-elles passées?” (which I’m reasonably confident is correct - I hope...!) BUT if we want to use “the holidays” instead of “they”, when I follow the rule I write “Comment tes vacances se sont-elles passées” or “Comment se sont tes vacances passées?  But my ear tells me this is wrong, and indeed when I look it up, the correct solution is “Comment se sont passées tes vacances?”. Which makes me wonder is there a rule that if we want to use the name of the thing in question, the subject, (instead of -ils / -elle / -elles / etc), the position changes and instead of being positioned after the auxiliary verb with a hyphen the subject goes to the end….????

I'm sure there are probably already Kwiziq lessons that would clarify this for me, so if anyone could point me in the right direction, that would be great...!

With Thanks,

Susan Wood.

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