How hard is French to learn? | An honest guide for English speakers

So I’m going to give you my brutally honest assessment - from experience - of just how hard French is to learn!

📺 WATCH NEXT:

⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:

📖 LEARN FRENCH THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:

Stories are the best way I have found to learn French (and the 7 other languages I speak). Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps, and learn the natural, effective way with my French Uncovered courses:

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro
00:30 Why French is easy
01:08 French pronunciation
01:57 French verb conjugation
03:02 Irregular French spelling
04:47 French gender
06:14 Best way to learn French

Other language learning projects I've documented on YouTube:

👉 Learn Thai in 14 Days:

👉 Daily Study Routines and Schedules

And here are some other cool videos I like about whether French is hard to learn:

[mrrandom]

I don't know why I, a Frenchman, keep watching videos in English about how to learn French 😅

[monsieurmadame]

Dude, French is so easy to learn. As a french native, i studied literally ZERO hour, yet I'm fluent.

[jaydee]

Waitress on Train: Un caf?
Mr. Bean: Oui.
Waitress on Train: Du sucre?
Mr. Bean: Non.
Waitress on Train: You speak very good French.
Mr. Bean: Gracias.

[glurper]

The good thing about French is that you could make A TON of mistakes and still be understood.
It's a really permissive language.
You don't have to bother about masculine/feminine : your accent is a dead giveaway that you are not a native anyway.

[jean-baptiste]

French verbs are very good if you want to tell a story in the past of someone who is planning to possibly do something in the future and you want the narrator to be in the present.

[soundlyawake]

You have a habit of making videos that immediately apply to me, but if your next video is about Tagalog I’ll be convinced you have me wire-tapped.

[Eldawn]

Honestly french is easy, but if you want to perfect it, it's a whole different dimension..

[PolyglotTraveler]

It's true that there are languages that are objectively more difficult than others. The grammar of Slavic languages is way more complex than the Chinese grammar. Latin languages have more than ten tenses while Hebrew has just three. The pronunciation in Spanish or Greek is clearly easier than in Chinese or Polish.

But at the end of the day I think that the biggest factor to judge the difficulty of a language is the degree of similarity with your mother tongue or with a language that you already speak to a descent level.

For example, Polish is a very hard language for a Spanish speaker like me, nonetheless I already speak Russian. So I'm already familiar with the Slavic pronunciation, the two verbs system (robic-zrobic), the declinations, and so on. If Polish was my first Slavic language, as a Spanish speaker, It would be very hard to get to a descent level in that language. But my Russian knowledge gave a great push forward to my Polish learning journey.

[dzl]

I’m American and studied French for a year and loved it. I used it a lot when I moved to Germany and visited France a lot. It’s a beautiful language and it’s not hard to learn. 60% of English is mis-pronounced French.

[metalheadlass]

After attempting to learn Japanese, I will no longer complain about French.

[notoriousbcco]

The next level about "Beau-Belle", is that you can also say "Un bel appartement" xdd

[djw]

I *used to* be able to speak and write French fairly fluently, and I learned it as an autodidact--to the point that one of my French friends said that I had no accent. However, since this language was so popular, I just "had to" be different and took up Russian as my second foreign language. (German, which I still speak and write fluently, is my second.) Now, I regret my decision to concentrate on other languages, and hope that I can regain what I knew when I was about 20 years old, as French is (in my opinion) the most beautiful language in terms of the way it sounds.

[richardhefft]

When I was a student in the 50s we studied Latin. After two years of Latin I found French incredibly easy

[antoineduchamp]

Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire..."I speak Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women and High German to my horse" That's the way to do it.

[panpankuku]

The « r » at the end of « parler » is not really silent. That’s the combination of the letters « er » that makes the sound « é »

[amandadavies..]

I'm a native English speaker and actually loved the old fashioned way I was taught French at school. I loved sitting there learning new grammar /verbs and tenses etc with Spanish and Italian. I taught myself some Portuguese using the same method. Everyone is different but for me I don't think I could possibly have ended up fluent in French without that thorough immersion into the language and the way it works.

[nath]

At 3:51 the "r" in "parler" is not silent just "er" make a sound (we can translate the sound by "é") it's the same for "ez" its make the sound "é" A word with a silent letter can be "chat" we don't pronounce the "t" (chat mean cat)
Other else the video is perfect! I speak French and this video can really help. I am sure many people learned with

[paranoidrodent]

As a natively bilingual (French/English) Canadian who is all too used to watching my fellow citizens (including friends and family) struggle with learning French or English as second languages, I have to say that your analysis and recommendations were spot on. Spoken French is far less daunting than formal writing (and informal written French, such as texting and such, is relatively forgiving).

Getting in the habit of actually speaking, especially to native speakers (so you pick up on stuff like contractions, informal terms, slang and such) is really important. Everyday spoken French does NOT sound like textbook French. It's way more streamlined and fluid. The dichotomy between casual everyday language and formal language is more pronounced in French and the textbooks focus on the formal.

Also, while both French and English lack phonetic spelling (so you cannot easily guess how a word is spelled in either language simply by hearing it), it is far easier to correctly sound out a word you have never heard before in French than in English because French is much more consistent in how it is sounded out. There's a pattern to what letters are silent, which silent letters modify preceding vowels and other such things.

In English, those patterns exist (e.g. an e following a vowel and consonant is usual silent but makes the preceding vowel long - e.g. can vs cane) but these are much less reliable and consistent (e.g. come does not have a long O but rather a short U). Take the many different soundings of "ough" for example (which are hellish for French speakers learning English). That doesn't tend to happen in French. In French, something like "ough" would have one consistent pronunciation (in any given accent/dialect - each dialect will tend to stay internally consistent but there is some variations between them - fewer silent consonants in Belgium, even more dropped consonants than usual paired with more complex and historically conservative vowels in Quebec, etc -- that said, they're all broadly mutually intelligible and most folks can drop to a more standard register of spoken French to mute their local dialect).

As for gender, honestly, most European languages have grammatical gender. English is the oddball that lost grammatical gender. Old English had 3 grammatical genders, like other Germanic languages. Sure, it adds a layer of difficulty for an English learner but grammatical gender is a thing in learning most Indo-European languages. In some ways, it's easier to start off without existing assumptions (being a blank slate, if you will) about grammatical gender because it can be trickier to learn a whole new set of them that don't match what you grew up with (like going from French to German and vice-versa).

[PSGOLDEN]

Thanks for promoting our language man! Vive la France

[Zerpo]

As a native french speaker, i think the most difficult thing, when you learn french, is not to be understand, but to understand native french. Like all the diminution of the words and the "verlan"