In 813, long before French became a national language, its distinction from Latin was well acknowledged. The French language spread in the world by means of conquest, treaty and the acquisition of the local languages, exploration, colonialism, conquest, diplomatic, economic and cultural interests.
Let’s now see if you can learn the language of French in the course of a single summer.
French is one of the easiest languages in the entire world to master. If you are an English native speaker or maybe speak one of the Romance languages like Spanish, Romanian, Italian, etc, then you have your work cut out for you. This is because French is exceptionally easy for these people. With that said, do not underestimate the language of French. Just because it might seem a little easy, doesn’t mean it will be a piece of cake. When we say easy, we mean you might not have to go through the extensive difficulties speakers like native Arabic, Chinese or Japanese speakers might have. Therefore if your ultimate plan is to master French in just a course of summer, then I hate to break it to you, but it isn’t quite possible.
You see, every language takes a while to actually master it. You cannot expect to enrol into classes, take a bunch of crash courses and wake up the next day completely fluent or proficient in the language. Learning a language is a task in itself. It requires immense practice, dedication, effort and time. You might be able to give the dedication, practice and effort but you will not have the time in just a course of summer. With that said, it doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to learn a single thing in the course of a summer. If your resources and time are utilised wisely, you might be able to actually master two out of the four skills that are important to be mastered in case of learning any language.
The four skills that are necessary to master are listening skills, speaking skills, reading skills and writing skills. If you are careful about your time and the effort that you dedicate to learn either of the two skills, you might actually be able to achieve a specific level of fluency in either. For example, if you want, you can couple up listening skills and speaking skills and practice both of them throughout summer and manage to achieve a decent level of fluency and both. Or you could end up coupling up reading skills and writing skills and again, achieve a decent level of fluency in both. At the end of the day, you can learn a decent level of French but you can definitely never master the entire language in the course of a single summer.
Finally,
75M people speak French as their 1st language. It is not only spoken in France but also in territories such as Burkina Faso, Bénin, etc. French, etc. The French is currently spoken by a huge Francophone population. After acquiring Gaul the Romans created what the world would know as French history. Indo-Europeans were Celts that lived in Gaul during the Romans, were very connected, in both culture and language, to the Greeks, the Romans and the Germans.