Why learning French isn’t hard...

Are languages Harder to Learn than Others ?

What’s the easiest language to learn? Why is Chinese harder to learn than Spanish?  How hard would it be to learn Tibetan ? My answer is unique : it’s not about the language, it’s about the learner...

The Defense Language Institute provides instruction in 24 languages, each ranked by difficulty into one of four categories To reach the same level of proficiency, you would have to study a Category I language (such as Spanish) for 26 weeks, a Category II language (think German) for 34 weeks, a Category III language (something like Thai) for 48 weeks, and a Category IV language (I’m looking at you, Arabic and Mandarin) for 64 weeks. That’s all well and good for DLI, considering that the majority of their students are native English speakers. But on the most basic level, it tells us nothing about how hard each language is to learn.

After all, what makes a language easy or hard?  Is it the writing system? Grammar rules like adjective agreement? The arbitrary use of genders for nouns? Don’t even get me started on cases and declension! I would argue that it is none of those things (or perhaps all of those things!) More important than any one facet of a language is the perspective from which you look at the language. What is your native language? How many languages have you learned? How old are you? In what environment are you learning the language? All of these factors play a role in how challenging we may find a specific language.

An infant learns Chinese in roughly 2-3 years with seemingly no effort at all (so unfair), whereas I studied French formally for nearly 10 years before I felt any sense of proficiency in the language. Does that make Chinese easier to learn than the french language ? I think most of us would argue certainly not. It depends on the learner. A native Arabic speaker attempting to learn Portuguese on their own in the Egypt will face an entirely different set of challenges than a native Spanish speaker who has moved to Brazil to learn Portuguese, don’t you think?
So what actually makes a language hard to learn? Certainly having no prior experience with learning languages will make the journey a tad more difficult for you.

Learning a language in your home country without native speaker assistance presents difficulties in comparison to immersion learning, of course. Having no motivation or desire to learn a language will also put a "plus" on your progress.

So, set your own language goals, work at a comfortable pace, find resources you enjoy learning from, find someone to help you through the difficult parts, and stick with it.The truth is every language is only as tough to learn as you make it out to be!

I often hear people say: “The french language is so hard!”

This exclamation is typically followed by exasperated handwringing over the difficulty of the pronunciation, the seemingly endless list of exceptions to every grammar rule, the conjugations, and so on. Benny Lewis, has written several posts about why learning Czech,Turkish, German, Mandarin Chinese, Hungarian, and other languages is not as hard as you think. His point is that with the right attitude and approach, learning a new language—despite what detractors might claim—is never as difficult a task as it’s often made out to be.

Any discussion of why French is not difficult for English speakers ought to begin with the date September 28, 1066, which is the date the Norman conquest of England began.

During the four hundred years that followed, a dialect of French known as Anglo-Norman became the language of the crown, the educated elite, and administration and justice. Even today, the Queen’s assent, which must be given to legislation passed by parliament in order to become law, is still issued in the french language !!!

But what does any of this have to do with learning the french language nowadays? Linguists estimate that about a third of English words are derived from French, meaning that, as an English speaker, you have a ready-made vocabulary that you can start using from day one.

From a practical standpoint, I’ve found that anytime people are at a loss for the right French word, coating an English word in a heavy French accent is a surprisingly effective strategy.

You’ll notice that many other “–tion” words appear in French almost exactly as they do in English, especially British English, which never replaced the “s” in words like réalistion with a “z” as we’ve done in American English.

The circumflex you find in many words usually signifies that an “s” used to be present but has since fallen out of use. Thus, words like hôpital and forêt translate to “hospital” and “forest” in English. There are many more tricks like this, and though they can’t always be perfectly applied, these examples should give you a sense of just how much linguistic history the two languages have in common.

Along with many of the French words that migrated into English came vestiges of their former pronunciations. Consider words and expressions like montage, déjà vu, bourgeois, comprise,brochure, filet mignon, chauffeur, lingerie, and encore. Without knowing it, you actually use many of the sounds found in French regularly.

Still others can give you clues as to what you shouldn’t pronounce, including faux pas, buffet,coup, and laissez-faire. 

Now I’ll admit that the French “r” and nasal sounds will probably take some practice and getting used to, but the best advice : just to go for the most stereotypical French accent you possibly could. Try it - it actually works!

One of the most common complaints among French learners is the seemingly incomprehensibility the verb conjugations. Consider the forms of the verb manger(meaning “to eat”) below:

First Person Singular: Je mange (“I eat”)

Second Person Singular: Tu manges (“You eat”)

Third Person Singular: Il/Elle/On mange(“He/She/One eats”)

First Person Plural: Nous mangeons (“We eat”)

Second Person Plural: Vous mangez (“You (pl.) eat”)

Third Person Plural: Ils/Elles mangent (“They eat”)

In fact, the difference between written and spoken French is so vast that the first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, and third person plural forms of the verb manger are pronounced exactly the same despite having written forms that appear to vary substantially.

Add to that the fact that the third person singular On form is usually used in place of the first person plural, and you don’t even have to think about changing the pronunciation for the majority of verb forms in the present indicative.

The group of verbs that manger belongs to, the –er verbs, is one of three, the other two being –irand –re verbs. The –er verbs are completely regular, the –ir verbs are mostly regular, and the –re verbs are mostly irregular.

Don’t let the third “irregular” group scare you, though. Not only does it comprise the smallest of the three groups, it’s also considered to be a “closed-class,” meaning that all new verbs introduced into the French language are of the first two “regular” classes.

Thus, new words like googliser, textoter, and téléviser take the regular forms. Even among the irregular verbs, you’ll be able to pick up on patterns that make their conjugations fairly predictable. Also remember that, as was the case with the –er verbs, the verb forms of the irregular verbs are pronounced mostly the same, though there are some exceptions.

As for the other tenses, anyone who’s learned Spanish will be relieved to find out that there are fewer tenses in French than in Spanish. In modern French, for example, the most frequently used past-tense construction is the passé composé, a compound tense composed of the verbavoir (meaning “to have”) or être (meaning “to be”) followed by the past participle of the conjugated verb.

In the passé composé, the first person singular form of manger is J’ai mangé, which literally translates to “I have eaten,” but it is also used to say “I ate.” Unlike English or Spanish, French uses the same tense to express both concepts. There is a passé simple, but it’s an antiquated literary tense that is seldom used in contemporary spoken French.

The french language also uses an imperfect tense—the imparfait—which has only one set of endings, contains only one exception (être, meaning “to be”), and is used in exactly the same way as the Spanish imperfect. In order to form the imparfait, take the present indicative Nousform of a verb, slice off the conjugated ending, add the imparfait ending, et voilà!

There’s the futur proche, which will be extremely familiar to speakers of English and Spanish. It simply combines the conjugated form of the verb aller, meaning “to go,” with an infinitive. It’s equivalent to saying in English, “I am going to [BLANK].” There’s also a futur simple that, like the imparfait, uses only one set of endings that are added to the “future stem,” which is usually just the infinitive or, for the irregular verbs, the infinitive with the final “e” chopped off.

There are about two-dozen irregular future stems, but these irregular stems also double as the stems for the conditional, which is formed by adding the imparfait endings you already know to the future stem. This might all sound confusing, but the main point is that these verb forms and moods are constructed using things you already know. The more you learn, the more your knowledge builds on itself.

There are, of course, plenty of quirks and exceptions in the French language, as there are in any language, but the key, as always, is just to go out and SPEAK IT!

Native speakers won’t be shy about correcting you, and the more you speak and make adjustments, the more natural it will become. Don’t worry if your pronunciation is a little off, or if you forget how to conjugate such and such verb, or if you forget which preposition to use. Just remember: everyone starts off speaking any language they learn like a baby...