Foreign Service Institute places French in Category I of languages which consists of languages which are more similar to English and require anywhere between 24 to 30 weeks to achieve a certain proficiency level. However, there are many people who find the French language a hard one to learn.

• Pronunciation

French, the language of love is known popularly as a beautiful language. However, many beginners learning French may find the pronunciation very difficult. The fact that French is not a phonetic language and other factors like the nasal vowels, silent letters and tricky R’s can make it look very difficult if you have not been exposed to any other romance language. It takes time to understand the rules of pronunciation and a lot of practice to learn the accent and the pronunciation.

 

• Spelling

Similar to pronunciation, the silent letters in French can make learning the spellings very difficult.

 

• False friends

Cognates are very helpful in learning a new language and there are many loanwords from French in English. However, this can be very tricky as well because there are many false friends as well which look similar to words in English but can have different meanings. Though this can be a challenge in learning French, you can actually use this feature to understand and learn them better as you know what exactly a word means in French.

 

• Gender in French

Unlike English, nouns in French have genders that could be masculine or feminine which can be identified with their ending or with articles used such as la or une for feminine or le or un for masculine. This can be baffling for a new language learner especially for those who use gender only for living things and not for all nouns.

 

• Prepositions and articles

The prepositions are based on gender which can make it very difficult to remember them. They can also vary depending on whether a noun is singular or plural. Articles that are used to specify the gender or number of the noun can also be difficult to master because they vary depending on whether a noun is singular or whether a word starts with a vowel or a consonant etc.  

 

• Conjugations

Verb conjugations can vary based on the subject in French. The use of different tenses and regular and irregular verbs could also look very confusing in the beginning. Finding shortcuts to learn these conjugations may not be easy and hence you would need to depend on the good old traditional method of learning which includes repetition, memorization, and application of the language in the real world.

Though these are some of the areas that might seem very difficult to master when learning French, the difficulty level may vary based on numerous factors. A person’s native language, his/her ability to learn other languages, reason or motivation to learn the language are some of them.

The resources that you choose to learn a language can also make a huge impact on how difficult or easy learning a language can be.

There are many online resources that allow the flexibility to learn French from your own space and at your own pace.