Exactly how hard is French to learn

Who am I to evaluate the question “is French hard to learn”? Well I studied French for seven years to a university level, and I am an American living in Europe teaching and learning languages. I also write software to help people study languages.

The French language is not that hard to learn if you are an English speaker. In fact, I think it is a very easy language.

Why?

  • Free vocabulary
  • Easy pronunciation
  • No grammar
  • French people make it hard to not speak their language
Is French hard to learn?

Is French hard to learn?

Free Vocabulary

The reason for an English speaker or any language learner in general especially from a European language is easy is it was so universal. For hundreds of years French was the language of England.  The French language was also spoken all over Europe by the educated.  Therefore, I would estimate about 40% of the words in English can be connected to French.  This is a lot of “free vocabulary”.

I study the Polish language.  There is very little, almost no free vocabulary in Polish.

Easy pronunciation

Compared to the tongue twisters of the Slavic languages or the tones of Chinese, Français is not hard.

You could almost speak many English words with a fake French accent and you will be understood. Speak with a lot of nasal sounds. Really what you have to do is watch French TV for about a day and that would be enough imitate the language. I am not saying that sarcastically but really. I teach and learning to imitate an accent is a very basic thing many people feel silly about.

Almost no grammar

People will be upset with this, but French has no cases and except for gender and fairly regular verb changes French has similar grammar to English.

This means the language of France is not hard.

French people refuse to speak other languages

Go to France and you will get immersion. Go to Poland and people are all trying to practice English and you will find it hard in many cases to even speak Polish. But in Paris or Montreal, the opposite is true and you will either sink or swim.

But you do not need to be in France because it is the official language in 29 counties in the world. It has 65 million native speakers and 250 million total speakers. That gives it a rank of 9th in the world for native speakers and 4th in the world over all for speakers. It is also a major language in the EU.

What do you have to do to learn French?

Learn about 200 verbs in different forms and about another 2000 common nouns and abstract words.  I do not recommend studying  nouns like horse and carrot which every language learners studies, but words like ‘but, ‘although, ‘seems’ which are abstract but very common.

My greatest improvements in speaking a language came when I was determined to learn large amounts of vocabulary. I used flashcards.  I am not talking about online flashcards but physical flashcards to learn. I do not like dictionaries.

The website you are on has nice word lists that you can print to start learning.

In summary, is French hard to learn? No! It is easy. It is one of the easiest languages in the world.  If you can not make progress with French then you do not know enough words and your method is wrong. Learn words with flashcards and word lists and I think you will agree with me that yes the language of the French people yes low stress and very easy.

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