Non-native French speakers: the French language is a piece of cake, isn't it?

Question

I like French, France and most French. But the French themselves seem to believe that their language for English speakers is [1] preciser, and [2] harder. OK! I'll concede [1], but only just. As regards difficulty, I think the French are just plain wrong. French is not a highly inflected language and the word order is, by and large, simple for most English speakers who want to learn that language. Also, many Modern English words have a Romance provenance. So, to what extent am I out on my own with this one? Are the French right in saying their language is hard? Answers from those English-speaking folk have more than one foreign language are especially welcome.

Answer 1

For Evil(something), your sentence doesn't make sense in French!

I'm French. I also study to be a translator. I don't think that French is preciser than English. We just express things differently.

I don't think French is THAT difficult. I mean, it's very similar to Spanish, and Spanish is easy to learn (I think). Also, French is very regular, even in it's irregularities. I mean, it might be difficult at the beginning, but once you know the irregular verbs and all the irregular words and grammar rules, then you're ok! Of course, there are nuances in French, but most French speakers don't even know about them!

As for English... English is VERY difficult in the sense that it has A LOT of irregularities. pronunciation is one. In French, if you have "A+U", you always pronounce it the same way. In English, whatever vowel will be pronounced differently depending on what comes before and after. And grammar is also quite difficult. It seems easy at first - and it is. But it gets more difficult!!!

The fact that a lot of foreigners can't speak French properly is irrelevant. Indeed, to speak a language fluently, you need to live in the country where it is spoken for a while. How many can do/afford that? You also need to keep on studying the grammar because a lot of French make mistakes (me included, I'm sure). As for the pronunciation, I think it's easier in French because most French people pronounce things the same way. Of course, if you go to the South of France, people have an accent and they tend to change the pronunciation at the end of the words. But generally speaking, the pronunciation is homogeneous (is that English?).

On the contrary, in England and in America, you hear tons of different accents and there are plenty of ways to pronounce a vowel! If you live in London (like I do), it's difficult to stick to one accent and be coherent!

To sum up, I do believe that English is more difficult than French, once you've been studying it for a few years (ex: university level). But then again, it depends on how hard you try to learn a language. For some people, some languages will be easier than others. Like all languages, to be able to speak it extremely well (like a grammarian, for instance), well, you really need to study very hard, even if it's your native language. But who really needs to know a language THAT well?

PS: I studied German for a year. Although it might seem to be difficult, once you understand how it works, it's fairly easy. It's a "logical" language.

Answer 2

I am french therefore it is difficult to judge my own language.. what is difficult is the use of tenses and especially the subjonctive. Even french people don't use it properly. However German is a difficult language too. I have been learning it for 8 years and the only thing i can say is 'Hallo Wie heist du? "...

However i don't agree with what you said: english is in my opinion preciser than french. And i think there are more words in english than in french, but that should be checked

Answer 3

hey, i'm a non-native English or French speaker but i can tell you that even if it has explicit rules for reading,French grammar is quite complex and difficult.it has so many rules and exceptions for them that you could easily get mixed up...also,a very confusing system of tenses...even though they use only a few in speach, you can't really get through if you don't know some of the others,and the cases in which a certain tense is used can occasionally be the same cases in which you use some other tense,depending on what you want to say. French is more delicate and more complicated than English...though English has it's 'charms' considering that there are no rules for reading and writing as in French, I find the grammar quite easy.

Answer 4

The U.S. is a big country, and even if we're not managing to completely impose a "Pax Americana" on the world, the world seems to be choosing, on its own, a "Pax Anglophonica." People the world over want to learn English, and this makes Americans indolent about learning foreing languages. This in itself is actually a barrier to learning a foreing language here. You can't get a lot of practice easily.

I don't see how you can say that French is more precise. When I lived in France in 1985, sometimes I'd invite my girlfriend to do something, she'd soemtimes answer: "Non, je ne peux pas, j'ai rendez-vous a cette heure-la." (Sorry, this textbox isn't taking my accents). A rendez-vous in this context could be a business-type appointment, or closer to what we in America call "a date." A pretty uneasy ambiguity for me to deal with...

It's not as highly inflected as German, but way more inflected than English. That definitely presents a challenge itself to English speakers. But the really hard thing for Anlgophones to get right in French is the gender of inanimate objects. Our brains don't wire themselves at those linguistically formative ages to think of "gifts" as boys and "chairs" as girls, and it doesn't come naturally -- we have to work very hard on this little bit.

Quick you Anglophones -- is lecon (sorry for the dropped cedilla) masculine or feminine? What about "chanson"?

Much of the above obviously applies to all Romance languages, so don't think I'm singling out French.

And in French French, even if you have a woman professor, she is "le professeur" -- that is, gender really is *purely* grammatical. I guess this might be different in Canada.

Some entertaining bits: In the movie "The Da Vinci Code", they always pronounced the name of that French emblem, the Fleur de Lys, with a silent final "s." And Audrey Tautou didn't even react! Americans labor under the delusion that all final s's in French are silent. My favorite of all is how we pronounce that French word for lady's underwear: the American pronunciation of "lingerie" is something like "lawn-zher-ay." My friends from France refuse to believe this until they hear it for themselves (and then some of them *still* don't believe it). But we seem to have no difficulty pronouncing "coterie" correctly -- odd, isn't it? Or is our pronunciation of "lingerie" a product of dual embarassments, of both boudoir and linguistic inhibitions?

I have Grevisse's Bon Usage on my book-shelf: a 1000+ pages on the subtleties of French usage.

Je ne dirais pas, alors, que c'est du gateau. Mais c'est beau!

Answer 5

What is easy for someone is difficult for someone else! We're all different in regards to the ease of learning.

I'm glad you find french easy. I think that there are a lot of french or latin word in the english language so vocabulary is not an issue. However the grammar is a pain in the neck. Even for a native french speaker. Millions of unexplained exceptions!

Bonne journée!

Answer 6

English is WAY more difficult than any of the romance languages. It has Germanic grammar, and the vocab is from all over the shop-pronunciations often bear little to no resemblance to the spelling assigned to them, silent letters AND most of out verbs are irregular. I speak French, Spanish and Portuguese and once you have grasped one of the romance langs the others will fall into place. Being able to speak German is not going to help you much when learning English.

Don't listen to the French-They are just trying to retain some cultural superiority

Answer 7

I'm French and I study English and German at university.
I find English much more difficult than French (especially the grammar and the phonetic) and even more difficult than German (that French students usually find very difficult in high school)

I think that French say that because in high school our French grammar seems to be difficult comparing to other languages, maybee because we learn only the bases of these languages.

Another reason is maybee that we don't meet a lot of foreign people speaking french, so we assume it's because it's difficult !

I'm curious of having the opinion of people learning french

Answer 8

I found French quite easy to learn, Italian is a complete piece of cake. German too, was quite straightforward, in a very plug'n'play kind of way. Russian, now that was a hard one - I gave up on Russian after a year. Chinese seems very difficult, but I only have anecdotal evidence on that. English has far more exceptions to its grammatical rules than French does, and more words that are pronounced the same that mean different things (eg.bough of a tree, take a bow. then compare with a bow tie and a new beau). English is easy to pick up the basics and very difficult to master.

Answer 9

French has a load of grammar rules. I'm actually having an easier time learning Japanese then French. But japanese isn't hard if you actually have experience. But back on topic, French does have a lot of grammar rules. So while learning French really focus on grammar rules.

Answer 10

hi i'm lebanese my native language is arabic but i learned french before arabic french is a piece of cake especially if you're english educated because many words are similar
ps: i went to france and french people do unfortunately have a lot of gramatical mistakes