Introduction

The French and English languages share the same alphabet. However, many other things differ between the two languages, and more often than not, French teaching methods teach French as if the rules were absolutely logical and obvious, not realizing how surprising and even disturbing French can be to an English speaker. French grammar and French pronunciation can be particularly complicated for English speakers.So in this article, I’ll explain what to watch out for, and the best approach to learn French for English speakers. Perhaps more important, though, are the many differences, both major and minor, between the two languages, such as a long list of false cognates—words that look similar but have vastly different meanings. French and English have hundreds of cognates (words that look and/or are pronounced alike in the two languages), including true cognates with similar meanings, false cognates with different meanings, and semi-false cognates—some similar and some with different meanings.

 

Let’s discuss if it’s easy to learn French for English speakers:

1. You might find Grammar easy: 

French grammar is in many ways similar to English grammar. A simple French sentence structure consists of a subject, a predicate and an object. For instance, the French language does not have different forms based on gender, or singular/plural. There are some differences between French and English, but it is not hard to trace the clue and bridge the gap. A major difference between the two languages is that there are a lot of measured words in French. The place and use of measure words in French are similar to how the English word ‘piece’ is placed and used in the phrase ‘a piece of paper’.

2. You Don’t Need to Go It Alone:

If you’re feeling like you’re fighting a solo battle against the French language, then of course you’re going to find it hard. Language is, after all, about communication. Sitting alone with your textbooks is useful, but insufficient to attaining fluency. If you really can’t find anything locally, the internet is your friend. You can find a French language partner online or try these options for conversation practice.

3. What exactly is easy about learning French?

French has a lot going for it if you want a language that will let you start using it fast. Here are a few things that made it easy for me. The vocab is very similar to English After the Norman invasion of 1066, French vocab infiltrated English so much that a lot of the words we use are of French origin. This makes actually learning the vocabulary relatively easy. In fact, check this sentence out:

4. Much of French grammar follows recognizable rules

English speakers recognize familiar structures in French: nouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, subjects, direct objects, prepositions. This isn’t always the case for languages farther removed from English. So with French, you’re already starting on familiar ground. People who have just started learning French might talk about verb conjugations, for example, as if they’ve never seen them before. But we conjugate in English, too. For example:

Je suis (I am)

Tu es (you are)

We just may never give it a name in our native language, because it’s instinctive.

5. French is relatively easy to read

Like in the sentence above, reading French is mostly straightforward. Even if you don’t know every word, getting the gist of it isn’t hard. This is mostly because of the similar vocabulary and identical alphabet. Try that with Russian! In fact, I was able to read French much earlier than I could actually speak or understand spoken French.