Three difficult French sticking points (is French difficult to learn?)
“I want to learn French,” I hear you cry! “But is French a difficult language?” Well, that is hard to say, there are many factors involved – what makes one language harder or easier to learn than another? After all, native speakers of any language do not have trouble learning it as children! So maybe they are all the same! But even if there were ‘easier’ languages to learn from the point of view of a native English speaker (which is what I think people really mean when they ask this question), every language still has its sticking points which can frustrate the keenest learner and halt your progress just when you thought that your language of choice was going to be a breeze. French is no different – while not the most difficult language around it wouldn’t be fair to say that it is easy learning French either. It does have some tricky aspects that every learner needs to deal with. Let’s see what some of those sticking points are as regards French, and how online French learning courses can help you overcome them:
1) The sound of French. This is a major difficulty for me, despite having listened to French for most of my life. I can understand written French fairly well, but when I hear someone speaking in French I just find it difficult to tune in. They seem to be talking very quickly, running words together, and it just doesn’t seem to sound like the French I learned at school! Well, of course, French speakers can understand each other, so it must be possible to understand! And the fact is of course, that it IS, it’s just a case of tuning your ears into it, and that takes practice. A good online French language course can help make this less difficult by continually exposing you to spoken French, with audio recordings every step of the way. And in time you WILL tune in, and it will become second nature.
2) The pronunciation of French. Similarly, learners can find French pronunciation very difficult. It is quite different from that of any other European language, with nasal sounds (pronounced partly through the nose) like -on and -an and the guttural (made with the back of the throat) ‘r’ sound presenting particular problems. An online course can help hugely with the difficult French pronunciation if, as is the case with the best courses, audio pronunciation of key words, sentences and dialogues is available at the press of a button. This would never be possible just learning from a book.
3) The genders of French. French nouns (words representing objects) all have a gender, either masculine or feminine. And unfortunately in French it is difficult to tell usually which noun is which gender. Yet you must know the gender of a noun in order to correctly use other words with it like adjectives and articles (‘the’ and ‘a’). For instance chat means ‘cat’, but it needs an article ‘the’, which is either ‘le’ or ‘la’ depending on whether a cat is male or female in French. Which is it? Well in French it is masculine – le chat – and if you said la chat that would be just plain wrong! Good French courses online will hold your hand through this, helping you intuitively learn through constant use which noun is of which gender, so that one day, like the French (who do it without difficulty!), you will use it correctly without even thinking!
Well, there are actually plenty more things that are difficult about French – there are few French learners who have not at some point cried in exasperation, “How can I learn French when there are so many rules!”. But I don’t want to discourage you if you are just starting out learning the language. Any online course worth its salt will address these issues and help you overcome them as painlessly as possible, one step at a time, all the while encouraging you in the most important aspect of all – using the language to communicate.
This article was originally published here on this site: Online Learning French and used here with the author’s permission. If you want to know more about language learning, you might want to take a look at this article, also by the same author. Learning a language is not easy – don’t let anyone promise otherwise. There is a very steep learning curve, especially to begin with. In fact, all of us are still learning our own language throughout our lives! But don’t let that discourage you, you will make progress learning a language if you just stick at it, and apply yourself to it regularly, even in small doses. You will be speaking Chinese/French/German before you know it!
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