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Is French really easier than English? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 25 of 131 14 June 2011 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You see, when a normal verb and a preposition love each other very much... they get together and... 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5365 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 26 of 131 14 June 2011 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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French is in my opinion. Although I' am a native English speaker so I'm biased.
French has awful spelling. French has genders. French has nasty verb conjuctions. French pronounciation I have found to be much harder than other languages I have studied (Spanish and Russian). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 27 of 131 14 June 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Compared to English, even French spelling seems beautiful and logical.
Never thought of genders as something particularly complicated, but then, English is the only gender-less language I've ever learnt (apart from computer languages).
True. All Romance languages have nasty conjugations.
French pronunciation is indeed complicated, but when you see a French word written, you can at least normally figure out more or less how it should be pronounced. When you see an unknown English word, however, it's all guesswork, and you'll have to consult a dictionary with IPA transcriptions to know for sure. Edited by tractor on 14 June 2011 at 10:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 28 of 131 14 June 2011 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't think anyone's claiming it's complicated, but it is more work to have to not only memorize vocabulary but also remember the gender thereof.
Hmm, never struck me as particularly difficult. I find Russian more trying with its chaotic stress shifts.
Agreed. French is pleasingly phonetic when compared to English. Liaison provides some difficulties, but even then there are a small set of rules that governs most situations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 29 of 131 14 June 2011 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's exactly the point - they aren't. What makes you believe they are logical is that you are used to them.
... actually, it isn't? Gender (or any other kind of word class) is simply a part of a word, like its meaning, its pronuncation, its spelling and its the register it is to be used in. Word class by itself doesn't make it more work to remember a word, unless, like in German, many of the indicators are re-used (like die (fem sg) and die (mas/fem/neu pl) - it takes more occurances of a word to figure out its gender/have it cemented in your brain). Edited by Bao on 14 June 2011 at 11:46pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6949 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 30 of 131 15 June 2011 at 4:40am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I would love to see the opinion of someone who speaks neither a Romance nor a Germanic
language as a native language. But even then, I'm afraid that the issue would be compounded by their exposure to English at an early age. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ojorolla Diglot Groupie France Joined 4965 days ago 90 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 31 of 131 15 June 2011 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I may be wrong, but aside from what other people said, I feel that most English words have a quite broad range of meanings every time I consult the dictionary. Not so much with French ones. Edited by Ojorolla on 15 June 2011 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| L1539 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5358 days ago 27 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 32 of 131 15 June 2011 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think English or French is harder in an absolute, objective sense. For someone who's learning both, it will depend on many things--native language, level of interest, etc.
A better question to ask would probably be: On average, is it harder for a native English speaker to learn French or a native French speaker to learn English (assuming that both people have roughly equal language learning ability, motivation, access to resources, opportunity to practice, etc.)? I don't know the answer to this. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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