Why It's Hard For An English Person To Learn French
Over the weekend, we posted an old article on Facebook that listed all the reasons why English is so hard to learn, and we got quite the reaction.
People are always saying how French is hard to learn, so we just wanted to find out if English actually was easier. And as it turns out, it's pretty damn hard. In fact, English is borderline sadistic when it comes to rules and exceptions.
READ ALSO: Why It's Hard For A French Person To Learn English
But a few of our readers reached out to us and asked if we could explore the opposite topic, to show how hard is it for an English person to learn French.
We found a few reasons why French is so difficult to learn:
Pronunciation
This may be one of the most difficult parts of learning French. There are a lot French words that contains sounds which simply don’t exist in English. This makes thing especially anointing because even if you are fluent and you can remember every word and definition, you still sound like shit every time you say the letter "R" or the word "Un"
Conjugation
In English conjugation is relatively simple and the verb never changes. (I eat - You eat - We eat - They eat)
But in French, the changes are significant. (Je mange - Tu manges - Ils mangent - Nous mangeons)
Then to add to the confusion the first three verbs in that list sound the same but are spelled differently.
Tenses
In English is cut and dry. There 3 tenses :
Past - Present - Future
But for some reason that possibly involves multidimensional time travel, the French language has 15 tenses:
Présent - Passé simple - Passé compose - Passé antérieur - Imparfait Futur simple - Plus que parfait - Futur Anteriéur - Subjonctif présent - Subjonctif passé - Subjonctif imparfait - Subjonctif perfect - Conditional present - Conditional passé 1 - Conditional passé
Inanimate objects are either boys or girls
For some reason the French language loves assigning genders to nouns seemingly without any logic behind it. It's just determined by what "sounds right" which can be pretty confusing for someone who doesn't know how the word is supposed to sound.
Consider two objects used for sitting, such as a bench and a chair. In French, one of those nouns is feminine and one if masculine (Confusing, I know) so it would "UNE chaise" and "UN banc".
It's the same with country names. Canada is a boy (Le Canada), but France is a girl (La France). So you go "Au Canada" but you can only go "En France."
This just handful of reasons why learning french is so damn difficult, so it's really no wonder that a lot of English people have a hard time mastering it.