It's an entertaining and intelligent article, especially useful as an introduction for beginners.

Some moments made me raise my eyebrows, like this one: "In fact, in the 1800s, French spelling was made harder in order to prevent the poor from becoming literate." I wasn't aware of that, and I'm not sure it's true.

I was particularly intrigued by the subjunctive - the concert example seems fairly self-explanatory. However, since I don't feel English as intuitively as native speakers do, I had to google which variant is more theorethical.

In my opinion, though a lot of attention is paid to the later stages of language learning, I'd love to read more. As this is the part I am most interested in, I am looking forward to the second part - for advanced and near-native learners!

I can't help but notice how low the hours are for English->French. I'm kinda jealous, for coming from Russian it all looks a bit difficulter.

BTW, the link works perfectly fine for me, just make sure to copy-past it in full.

:

Great article! The author recommends the Krashen/Kaufmann "Comprehensible Input" approach and Lingq.

One must sign in to "Medium" (I used my Google account) first before your link would work.

Searching on "hack french" while in "Medium" does not work. I searched on "1efc6eae8c2" (part of the url). "Bran Lightfoot" works too.

The best part of the article for me was a rundown on one's development in terms of hours spent with the language.