In their language difficulty ranking, the Foreign Service Institute puts French in the top ten easiest languages to learn for English-speakers, alongside notoriously easy languages such as Spanish and Italian.
French is a Category I language according to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). This means that the average time to learn French for native English speakers is 600 hours or 28 weeks of study. That's fairly easy compared to other languages.
French is ranked as one of the hardest languages to learn because grammatical structures are more difficult for native English speakers, such as sentence word order (which can be changed depending on whether speaker or subject is the focus of the sentence), compound nouns, the agreement between adjective and noun which ...
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Is English Harder than French To Learn? French is not as hard to learn as it is considered by most of the people, especially when compared to English. In fact, it is a language that's much easier to achieve fluency in than you'd have ever expected. English is inconsistent when it comes to pronunciation.
Overall, French is generally considered to be mildly challenging, but to be honest, it greatly depends on your native language. Students from English-speaking countries will enjoy a big headstart for many reasons that we'll explain shortly.
French vocab only gets easier
Some languages start out quite easy and then get harder as you go along. But French is one of those languages that starts out quite hard, but then gets easier. Especially if you speak English already.
Finnish is the dark horse of languages found in Europe and one of the hardest worldwide. Though within Europe, Finnish isn't part of the Indo-European languages. You won't find shared roots or cognates here, which means Finnish is a bit of a blank slate. Then there's the grammar.
French people report being relatively less happy than one might expect, given their high standard of living. Brulé shows that this is largely due to their lack of freedom. French people report that they feel considerably less free than people in other developed nations.
So, here are 6 of the fastest spoken languages in the world, based on the average number of syllables spoken per second (SPS): Japanese - 7.84 SPS. Spanish - 7.82 SPS. French - 7.18 SPS.
Nitty-gritty things like these can make getting started a bit of a challenge – but between the two, French will be a little easier, with (slightly) fewer endings to learn. That said, experts largely agree that the more German you learn, the easier it gets, while French gets more complicated the deeper you dive in.
Mandarin Chinese is generally considered to be easier to learn than French due to its simpler grammar, phonetic writing system, simpler vocabulary, and more logical structure.
The average rates we found were quasi-identical: 176 words per minute for English and 174 words per minute for French. (The rates in syllables per minute were not significantly different either).
Listening to French can be challenging for English speakers for a number of reasons. First, the French sound system is quite different from that of English, with more nasal sounds and vowel distinctions. Additionally, French words often have multiple meaning, which can make it difficult to follow a conversation.
The German language is often considered more useful if you're planning on doing some research in Germany or any of the European countries where it's spoken. It's also a great choice if you want to study business or engineering.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world.
Top 10 Hardest Languages To Learn – Finnish
After the Hungarian grammar, the Finnish language has the most challenging grammar. It sounds and looks a bit similar to English because of its pronunciation and lettering. But the grammar makes it far more complicated than the English language.
Of the 52 winners of the Fields Medal, often called the Nobel Prize of math, 11 have been French. Only the U.S., a country five times the size of France, has had more: 13.
Spanish pronunciation is easier to the English native speaker, while the French accent can be difficult to master. The French language has sounds that are unfamiliar to a native English speaker. Inability to roll the tongue can make speaking Spanish a challenge.
Marseille Accent
Their accent is characterized as sing-songy. This is, in part, due to the sunny, warm disposition that Southerners are stereotypically known to have. Compared with Parisians, Southern French people speak French at a slower rate, which can make it seem easy to understand.