Is French Difficult?

Hi, Steve Kaufmann here ...today, I'm going to talk about French.

I'm going to speak initially in English and then in French.

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So French, French has things that makes it easy to learn and things

that makes it difficult to learn.

The biggest sort of factor that would make French easy is that it shares

a lot of vocabulary with English and English is very widely spoken, not

only in English speaking countries, but by people all around the world.

Uh, I don't know, statistically, I think something like 60% of words in

English are of French origin or at least of Latin based language origin.

But most of that comes from French from the time of the Norman French

invasion of Britain in 1066.

So if there are so many common words, I mean the biggest obstacle to learning

a language is vocabulary, and when you listened to the French portion

of this video you will see that most of the words are identifiable

as words that we use in English.

And, uh, the French portion of this video will be made available, uh, in

LingQ as a lesson, even though I'm not a native speaker so that you can look

up words and phrases and learn them.

So the big advantage, therefore that English speakers have in

learning French is vocabulary.

I can tell you as someone who has learned languages where there is little

or no vocabulary common to languages that I know, it's a lot more difficult.

And even though there are some so-called false friends, the similarity in

vocabulary is an enormous advantage.

Sometimes we don't recognize that these words are the same or

similar to English words because they're are spelled differently.

Um, for example, wherever in France, they use an, an accent.

You know, the aigu and or the circonflexe very often that hides

an 's' so ... is like study.

Uh ... is school.

Uh, ... is host or ... is hostile, so that if you put an 's' in where

you see those accents, you will find it easier to recognize those words

as being similar to English words.

So that's the good news.

What makes things a little more difficult is that French spelling is not obvious.

It's not obvious that EAULT is 'au' um, you know, even the sound 'au' can

be as in ... meaning word or ... BEAU.

In fact ... is written MOT ... plurals is MOTS.

And you don't hear the S.

... BEAU.

If it's plural, you put an X on it.

You still don't hear the X, unless there's a liaison.

So that's just touching on the surface of the difficulties with French

spelling, not obvious to an English speaker, but then spelling in English,

isn't obvious to non-English speakers.

So this is something that we have to get used to, and it is an element that

makes French somewhat more difficult.

The only solution is to do a lot of reading and listening and getting

used to how words that are written a certain way are pronounced.

Spelling, therefore, is a problem.

Uh, I consider the issues of pronunciation and comprehension related.

Uh, some people find French difficult to understand because of the nasal

sounds and because of the liaison.

So first of all, the nasal sounds the ... don't exist in English and it's very

easy to get them wrong when we speak.

And sometimes to not understand well, when we hear them in different contexts.

Uh, another issue that affects comprehension is the liaison where

very often the consonant of the previous word almost seems like the

initial consonant in the next word.

And therefore we don't notice what we're listening to.

If you...

like ... if it's ... all by itself, it's ... when it's followed by a vowel

and the next word, it becomes ... and it's as if the cosonant has all of a sudden

been attached to the succeeding word.

So those are things again that we can read explanations of but

until we train our brain through a lot of listening, it's difficult.

Another difficulty in French is gender and is not obvious.

Whereas I say in Spanish words that end in 'o' tend in most cases to be masculine.

Words that end in 'a' tend in most cases to be feminine.

In French, it's less obvious.

And I'll give you some examples in the French portion of this.

Uh, so gender is an issue.

So ... plural is an issue, uh, but all of these things, and I

should finish by saying verbs can be difficult with many different

conjugations and a variety of tenses.

Um, nowadays of course, with, uh, conjugating dictionaries, such

as we use it LingQ it's easy.

Every time you see a verb to look it up, see which form of the verb

that is in the conjugation table.

And every time you do that and you kind of scan the conjugation table itself,

and it sort of helps you notice what's happening, but in the end you simply have

to spend a lot of time with the language.

In the French video I will, uh, recommend a song that you can listen to, to work on

your pronunciation, uh, because this song includes many of the sounds that I think

are crucial to French, such as the sound of ... that is an 'e' without an accent.

... when it's pronounced and when it's not pronounced and it's called "Le Petit

Cheval Blanc" so it's Le Petit Cheval Blanc but can also be Le Petit so

the 'eu' sometimes disappears, 'eu' is sometimes pronounced at the end of the

word sometimes not pronounced, but I think having a sense of the use of the

'eu' this is my personal theory is very helpful in getting the feel of French

and being able to pronounce French.

And I very much recommend you listen to this, um, song by Georges Brassens.