Is French Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content)

As an English speaker, French is considered one of the easier languages to learn. Of course, learning any language is not easy, but French is certainly one of the easier languages for an English speaker to get a grip on. Relatively speaking, French is not very difficult to learn.

Learning any second language takes time, effort, and patience.

You are embarking on a journey that could take years before you are fully fluent.

Some might be faster learners than others for one reason or another, but there’s really no hard and fast shortcut.

Let’s find out more.

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How long does it take to learn French?

It varies, and this will always depend very heavily on the person and the individual case.

Learning any language from scratch takes a long time, especially if you are aiming to become anything close to fluent.

That said, relatively speaking, French will be one of the quicker languages you can learn as an English speaker.

French is generally estimated at requiring around 575-600 hours of study for you to get to the point of being able to hold conversations and generally conduct yourself in French.

This would mean around 24 weeks of full time study.

Though this is a relatively short amount of time in which to be able to learn a language, it’s still a very long time to spend studying any one thing.

At the end of that roughly six months of study, you will be at a point of being able to speak French and hold complex conversations in French.

However, as anyone who’s ever learned a second language will tell you, the learning isn’t over there.

Most people tend to say the best way to get really fluent, even native level, in another language, is to live in the country and immerse yourself in the language.

While this isn’t possible for everyone, naturally, the point is that by the time you come to the end of your study, you will still have a long way to go.

Living around the French language, or even simply watching French TV and movies, is going to be the next step in your continued journey.

After a couple of years or so, most people will have reached a level of fluency that they might be indistinguishable from a native.

So, while it involves a relatively short period of study, becoming fully fluent is going to take a bit longer.

Is it hard to learn French for an English speaker?

Again, relatively speaking, French is not hard for an English speaker to learn.

Being an English speaker, as I’ve mentioned, gives you a considerable leg up in getting to grips with it.

The two languages bear a great deal of similarity, and though they are naturally very different, too, the basic rules of English do go a long way to making French easier to learn.

That said, I do want to stress that learning an entirely new language is never easy.

It also depends on the individual in a lot of cases.

Some will have an easier time learning new languages than others.

Some simply have brains that are, for want of a better phrase, better wired for language learning.

With persistence, patience, and commitment, though, anyone can push through and learn French.

And, yes, if you are an English native speaker, then this will certainly be an advantage in learning the language.

What level of difficulty is French?

Handily, languages themselves can actually be classified by their difficulty—obviously these classifications assume the speaker’s first language.

For our purposes, the FSI scale is a system put in place by the U.S. government to rank languages based on how hard or easy they are to learn.

This scale rates languages from category I to category V.

For an English speaker, French is regarded as a category I language—meaning that it is among the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn.

Category I languages usually require around 6 months of full time study, and are typically very closely related to English.

Indeed, even among category I languages, French is generally considered one of the easier to learn.

Is French harder than Spanish?

This is rather a difficult question to answer.

For the most part, there’s very little difference in difficulty level between French and Spanish—both of which are category I languages.

For an English speaker, with the right amount of patience, both languages are relatively easy to get to grips with.

The one thing that might mean Spanish has a slight edge in easiness over French is pronunciation.

Spanish pronunciation is generally easier to get a grip on than French, for the first year or so.

After that, there’s really not much difference.

Again, though, you personally may happen to find French easier to learn for one reason or another.

It very much depends on the person. In general, though, languages defined in the same category on the FSI scale aren’t much harder to learn than one another.

Learning French, you might say, is one of your easier options when it comes to learning a second language as an English speaker.

However, there’s still really nothing outright easy about it.

Not to belabor this point, but it is never really easy to learn a language.

With that said, English being your native language will make the task a lot easier, and compared with other similar languages, it’s relatively easy to learn.

 
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