Overall, the hardest thing about learning French is oral comprehension (listening). This is due to variations in vernacular, the urgency of listening, our brains' resistance to the spoken word, and silent letters.
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 ...
All that doesn't make the life of native English speakers easier when learning the French language. We have some good news, though. The three issues mentioned above – gender, conjugation, and subjunctive mood – are the most challenging aspects of French grammar.
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.
The FSI scale ranks French as a “category I language”, considered “more similar to English” compared to categories III and IV “hard” or “super-hard languages”. According to the FSI, French is one of the easiest languages to learn for a native English speaker.
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.
So, if you are confused to learn French or Japanese, which is easier to learn and more useful becomes two of the major concerns. Generally, French is easier and more useful for most people, regardless of the Japanese culture or living in Japan.
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.
Arabic is the queen of poetic languages, the 6th official language of the UN and second on our list of toughest languages to learn.
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.
A strong Québécois accent is one of the more difficult French accents to understand.
#1 Parisian French
Of the accents of France, the Paris accent is perhaps the hardest to nail down. And that's because Parisian French is considered “standard French” – or French without an accent. Also, not every Parisian speaks the same way (just think how many accents there are in London).
While speaking English, in Paris, is not considered rude, expecting every French person to speak French will surely be seen as such. To avoid a cold reaction from the other party, it will always be appreciated to start the conversation with a simple sentence in French.
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.
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.
According to a UNESCO survey, Bengali has been classified as the sweetest language in the world. As a language, Bengali is widely spoken all over India, including Assam and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The sweetest language in the world is also recognized in the Constitution of India.
We drew parallels between Chinese and German, French, Spanish, Italian and even English and we discovered that not only is the pronunciation of Chinese much simpler than French, but its grammar is also more straightforward and easy to learn than German, Spanish, Italian and English.
French is a Category I language, so it's relatively easy to learn for native English speakers. It will take approximately 580 hours or 23 weeks of study to reach complete French fluency. Which we could break down as the following: If you study for 1 hour every day, you can learn French in 1.5 years.
If you live in the United States or plan to travel throughout Latin America, Spanish is probably going to be much more useful to you. However, if you're in Canada, or planning to travel or do business there, knowing French is going to be more helpful — it's an official language of the country, after all.