How hard is French to learn? | An honest guide for English speakers
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- Опубліковано 31 тра 2024
- 🇫🇷 🇨🇦 Is French a hard language to learn? Well, I speak 8 languages… including French
So I’m going to give you my brutally honest assessment - from experience - of just how hard French is to learn!
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⏱ 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 UA-cam:
👉 Learn Thai in 14 Days:
ua-cam.com/users/playlist?list...
👉 Daily Study Routines and Schedules
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZVhh...
And here are some other cool videos I like about whether French is hard to learn:
• Is French easy or diff...
• Why French is Difficul...
• How Hard Is It To Lear...
🚀 Watch next: How to learn French with stories: ua-cam.com/video/dPqWN2dlsBg/v-deo.html
I thought u forgot the most important things that is french and English share 58% of their vocabulary ( 29% of English vocabulary came from french and 29% from latin. French is basicaly based on latin too)
J'apprendé le français depuis novembre et je suis d'accord avec vous. J'étudie quotidiennement, mais parfois avec mes jeu vidéos en français ou essayé de parler avec mes amies francophones. C'est amusant. J'aime cette belle langue! Merci pour le vidéo.
french is very hard to learn forget it
la belle maison , le bel arbre , le beau train
moi je parle français and your french level is perfect
I don't know why I, a Frenchman, keep watching videos in English about how to learn French 😅
On est découvert...
@@ngamashaka4894 cause let's be honest french is damn too hard... Good luck guys...
@@moefag cause we barely speak properly our own language!
😂 Idem
Same here 😊
Dude, French is so easy to learn. As a french native, i studied literally ZERO hour, yet I'm fluent.
Tbf the differance between a french who barely knows how to read or write french and a french who mastered the language lies litteraly in books and speeches.
Nah if you're a French native, you probably spent hours studying the language in primary school
@@adrien9662 Le second degré c'est pas qu'une température
That’s called « second degré » in French guys, he’s joking.
C'est pas faux. Mais surement la raison pour laquelle on trouve 4 fautes par phrase dans tous les coms... Quand les Français parlent leur langue moins bien que les étrangers.
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.
Très très Drôle beaucoup
Amazing
@@Sammy-yq8ix One should only speak in French when one can't think of the English for a thing.
hahahahahah very funny
café*
I spent 8 years learning French in school and was never anywhere near fluent. Years later I learned it in 5 months. It's not about the time you spend learning, it's about the method.
What method did you use? Those years was not a total waste.
@@sgal88 it's never wasted, even words you think you forget are still somewhere in your brain. That probably helped in the 5 months he relearned French
I don't know what you're calling '' I leaned French ''. In fact I think that nobody can learn the French completely. I was born in France and I'm still learning some of verb forms because there are so many.
Here I think about '' subjonctif du conditionnel passé '' like '' il aurait fallu que je puisse aller au toilette '' which means I would have had to go to the bathroom (sry for my English). There are a lot of languages forms that French do not use. There are written form, oral form, telling form,...
I like to say that French are the worst French speakers in the world because we eat some parts of the words and some of us are doing a lot of failure.
So even when you really speak well French you can improve your speak.
See you soon guys
@@puitout5116 Absolutely! Hence, when the question is asked, how many languages do you speak, everyone should answer, at the minimum, one language, for their primary language is neverending.
Unfortunately one can never become fluent with classes at school (unless it’s your degree at uni) because the method is just wrong in many countries and everyone learns languages differently so there cannot be a single method
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.
depends what kind of mistake, you can make things sound sexual very easily in french
@@zzaronn I was thinking about mixing feminine/masculine, failing to conjugate, and switching the place of words. French people can still understand what you mean if you do all those.
@@glurp1er if you use the right verb and noun you can get people to understand you i guess
Non t'en fais pas on comprend meme si vous confondez le masculin/feminin bien que c'est extremement derangeant... mais bon ça donne un peu de classe d'avoir l'accent Americain ou Londonien 😄
Listen to this guy. He's right.
Just speak, no one cares about your mistakes.
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.
and yet I hate french...
@@naweed4862 This is plu plu perfect.
@@firsttpt well you may have try to say something like plus que parfait but dude i'm french i don't think you have something to taught me...
@@naweed4862 I can see how it would be difficult for a non-native English speaker to get the joke.
Spanish is even better at that: they have a few more tenses, but more importantly, they do use all of them...
Honestly french is easy, but if you want to perfect it, it's a whole different dimension..
Croive
as French, even the French do not have a perfect command of their own language. Especially in writing
@@nerfi2983 Je dois quelquefois moi-même traduire mes phrases en français simplifié, mais après, quand on lit Goethe ou un auteur anglais, on peut bien penser que cela concerne tout le monde.
Bonjour je suis français, mais je parle anglais good bye see you soon. ☺️
@@xevelation say with a Russian name
The next level about "Beau-Belle", is that you can also say "Un bel appartement" xdd
The rule for « bel » instead of « beau » is that usually you use « bel » before a word that start with a vowel and « beau » when it starts with a consonant.
@@arnaudlafay3465 yep!
@@arnaudlafay3465 What about this one ? "Les gens bons" but "les bonnes gens" ;)
@@bladysrp1189 it’s a specificity of the word « gens » if you put the adjective before it’s feminine but if you put it after it’s masculine. But usually when you use gens you put the adjectives after.
@@bladysrp1189 Les gens bons = ham
After attempting to learn Japanese, I will no longer complain about French.
Funny cause I gave up french for japanese LOL
I think most people who complain about French have never tried learning Japanese, German, Russian or basically most other languages lol
@@l.k5244 honestly, German is easy too
Ah ha ha! I purposely spent a week trying to learn Mandarin, KNOWING it would send me screaming back to French in gratitude!! And it worked! I was crying after my first HOUR of Mandarin!😂😀 French seems like child's play now!!
@@lisaahmari7199 😂😂
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.
Great comment! Most people asking this question are learning their first language, and believe that any language learning is hard, so I think it’s useful to address the question.
@@storylearning Yeah! Nice channel by the way. I'm traveling the world learning languages and I just started making some videos about my polyglot experiences. You are a great inspiration for me man!
My primary theory is that "difficulty" is related to geography or the physical distance between language locales. That's why I think native English speakers would do better with a Romance language or related Germanic language before tackling a Slavic, Semitic or even Turkic language. Asian languages are a whole other ballgame (for me).
My wife is Macedonian. Reading and writing in Macedonian is extremely simple...however, when it comes to cases and conjugating, it is far more difficult than English...and it does have genders.
Как тот, кто до сих пор не запомнил число букв в русском алфавите, и при этом так и не уразумел согласование времен в английском.....Моё увОжение. Особенно за падежи :)
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.
I guess that’s a good thing? 😅
Ooh Tagalog took me a few years to learn, very beautiful language
Tagalog but mixed with english and provincial language you are dwelling. So Tagalog + English + Bikol = the language of Philippines 😂
Wow it's my first time hearing foreigners trying to learn my language, makes me so happy ngl ahahhaha, bless you guys.
@@Matt-uu9lz even the name of the language is weird, tagalog - tag a log in English. Some of the slang words in tagalog are even weird like for example; Stambay means not doing anything or literally just to Stand by, Losyang means you're old or lost young. I could name more!
The « r » at the end of « parler » is not really silent. That’s the combination of the letters « er » that makes the sound « é »
ton pseudo m'a fait rire... je suis pitoyable. si jai mon bac c'est un exceptionnel
@@NIPPA_CLP vue ton pseudo 😩✨😂😂
That's true, but i'm not sure it's something to be told to someone who wants to learn. It will just create confusion for nothing. And then they will not be able to pronounce hundreds of words like "permis" or "dernier"
@@hazellk4042 something who can help them : in one syllabel, if the "e" isn't at the end, and that there is a consonant at the end, then the "e" won't be spelled "e" but é or è.
Ef-fi-ca-ce (efficacity) / Par-ler (speak) / Der-ni-er (last) / es-sai (a try) etc...
@@DJAxykOfficial Not sure it can help in a conversation if you have to think about it for 5 minutes before saying what you wanted to say xD
From my perspective it's just better not to worry so much about it and just make mistakes.
It will come by itself just by practicing and getting used to the words.
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.
Danach sein pferd ist gestorben
@@thatdbzguyfr hahaha deutsch ist ein schön Sprache Man ! Ich habe deutsch Gelernt begann wenn ich fand dass Angela merkel der gleiche Dinge sagen war ( einen impression natürlich ) und ich hatte dieses will der Sprache zu verstanden. Und fähig sein der Worten auf einen Reihe stellen auf fühlt sehr bemächtig weil für etwas Ursache ist deutsch sehr mehr schön als anderen sprachen gegen Leutens Seele weil deutsch ist einen kehlig Sprache und das ist dem Auslöser wieso deutsch sieht hübsch aus für mich. Schließlich bitte korrigieren mich ob ich einen Fehler gemacht habe.
@@quentinultramegadroiteradi7345 Wunderbar lol, was ist deine muttersprache?
@@thatdbzguyfr Fransosich und deutsch ist meinen dritte Sprache, englisch meine zweite
@@quentinultramegadroiteradi7345Ich spreche nur englisch und deutsch, und es wird "Französisch'' geschrieben
Spanish: I'm a difficult language because I have grammatical gender. Everything is either male or female.
French: So what? I have that, too, but I don't slap an "A" on all my feminine nouns and an "O" on my masculine nouns, so with me, you actually have to memorize the genders of nouns.
German: Amateurs. I have those, plus a neutral gender, and zero logic for classifying them. Spoons are male! Forks are female! Knives have no gender!
Swahili: Well, I don't have gender... but I do have 16 noun classes, which are basically the same thing. And you can't even say "it" or conjugate a verb without knowing which class that particular noun belongs to.
The sheer audacity and bravery one must have to learn all of these. Respect.
Hey German? You forgot about grammatical cases (Nominativ, Akkusativ, Genitiv, Dativ). We have them in French, but how we write words doesn't depend on it!
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
@Soyel « ai » isn’t the é sound, it’s the è one. It’s a bit different
Bonjours je suis français comment tu vas wshh
What he means is that there is no /r/ sound when you pronounce parler (compare with rouge). Thus, it's completely correct to say the letter is silent.
In words like hier, hiver, fier, on the other hand, it's not silent.
I was taught that letters at the end of French words were silent, except for c,r,f and l. We needed to be CaReFuL, to get it right.
@Soyel Je sais pas, je l’utilise pas mal quand même, tout les futurs a la première personne (« j’irai »), les mots ou l’accent est indiqué (« parenthèse »), tout les mots avec « -elle », les mots avec des « ê » (même, par exemple, c’est mème et pas méme), et tout les gens que je connais disent pareil
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.
When I was a student in the 50s we studied Latin. After two years of Latin I found French incredibly easy
incredibly easy isn't the word if not you would speak perfect french what I don't think you are able of...
French is hardest than Latin
As easy as your mum
@@lilultime6555 ok zoomer
@@justinruel8868 Well no, actual Latin langages are simplified Latin. Fewer tenses, fewer rules.
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"
Ouch. French slang is murderous to academically-taught foreign speakers.
Yeah, that's what i taught too, how the hell would you understand the slang if you were taught "normal" french
@@user-sg4ov7ng4h i just mean, people learning by living in france can catch some slang up pretty fast. But if you have been taught french academically, it is going to be a rude awakening ^^
From my foreign understanding from movies and what native teachers have told me, most diminutions just take part of the word or the english word and add an o at the end and has become common knowledge and presented in courses, so they have made the "double verlan" which turns the verlan word back up into a weird twisted version of the original word, someone told me that.
If you speak to a french native, he will simplify his vocabulary and try to not use so much "argot" (french word for slang) :D
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.
I think Spanish or Italian are more popular than French,, that's why I decided to learn French.
As a French, thanks dude
Hé bien il est temps de s'y remettre ;)
@@raphaelmaillot Vous avez raison, mais je ne veux pas m'enliser. :)
ok repete apres moi , je me brosse la teuch avec un grattoir spontex , part 1 ex2 : oh non jean paul t'a giclé de partout , t'en a mis plein les rideaux , c'est pas dur de viser ma bouche pourtant , part 2 ex 1 : j'ai vu greg au grec il a le zgeg de drake donc jle drague sa marche pas ducoup jle drogue. bienvenue dans la vraie france :)
The reasons for learning are insanely important. If you have decent reasons then the difficulty becomes totally irrelevant.
I agree completely!
One huge reason to learn is living in France! Still hellish…
i just want sunlight and escape this hellhole that is west-central-northern europe.
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 etc.....same 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.
si tu pense que tu parle couramment francais c'est très bien car meme moi, un francais, j'ai du mal avec certains temps
If u think you're fluent in frenh, that's actually pretty good cause even me, a french guy, i still struggle with some tenses
@@mickaelcoulon5604 J'habitais en France et quelq'un m'avait dit qu'elle ne savait pas que j'étais anglaise. C'était dans les années 80 alors maintenant je ne sais pas si je pourrais toujours parler tellement bien, mais quand même je pourrais me débrouiller pas mal.
I loathed it tbh. I went to public school and had these dusty old relics boring me to death about tenses, verbs, contantly rolling your "rrrs" Drove me nuts. It was the most boring way of learning.
@@amandadavies.. ton français est plus que correct
@@spanishpeaches2930 I loved it but maybe it was the fact that I found it very easy, that made me like it so much too. I couldn't say that about most other subjects, so learning languages gave me something to look forward to, to break up the other lessons. Most of my classmates would agree with you....they were clueless, just like I was in certain other subjects.
I loved all that stuff, tenses, verbs and lots of other grammar. It's actually necessary though, if you want to learn a language properly / thoroughly.
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).
As a Canadian French speaker and an amateur linguist, I laughed when he said French had more vowel sounds while referring to Standard French.
There are way more vowels and diphthongs in Canadian French. Comparing the two, Canadian French phonology is way more complex.
@@ailawil89 Indeed! I've seen another language UA-camr identify 23 different vowel sounds using the phonetic alphabet for my family's Lac-St-Jean dialect. I'm always a little baffled at how European French has collapsed so many vowels together. (laughing)
Tabernacle
@@lilultime6555 That’s just a religious term. The curse word is “tabarnak.”
@@ailawil89 Tabarnak comes from Tabernacle, right? I wasn't sure whether if tabarnak was the wrong spelling or if it was tabernacle, thank you!
Wa had a geography teacher, perfect bilingual German-French. In fact his french was so good it took us months to discover he was in fact German.
He said:
- It takes 3 weeks to learn Dutch
- It takes 3 months to learn English
- It takes 3 years to learn German
- It takes your whole life to learn French.
As a French, I'm agree with that 😂
Clearly, he hasn't tried Japanese. 日日本語は他のレベルで住んでいる。文法から漢字全てがたくさん時間をかけることだ。
Asian languages r a different world of complicated imo.
I’d say French is for subtle conversation , emotions and descriptions. English is for efficiency, science.
What's the difference between dutch and german lol
What he said is bullcrap. For the average Anglo, learning Dutch takes as much time as learning French - says the US Foreign Service Institute
Bonjour! Je suis une Québécoise et j’apprécie beaucoup que vous avez mis un petit drapeau du Canada à côté du drapeau français. Vous donnez de très bon conseils je crois pour apprendre le français, j'espère que ça va aider beaucoup de gens à apprendre cette belle langue!
Cette belle langue compliquée mais cette belle langue quand même
Bravo Myriam et vive la belle province du Québec!
Un français du Nord de notre beau pays vous embrasse affectueusement.
@@celineinnocenzi9222 Merci beaucoup Céline!
Rip les Suisses
LE QUÉBEC EST PAS LE CANADA
Thanks for promoting our language man! Vive la France
As a french i can tell you than the "r" at the end of "parler" isn't silent it's here to make the sound [e] if it wasn't here it would sound like the end of the Word "parole" for example
Silent consonne "R" with "Parler" is a bad exemple, because in this exemple "er" is a digraph like "et" but digraphs "et" and "er" are pronounced the same (Entrer et parler) . But the surprise is "er" can be pronounced like "ai" (Un vers dans la haie. )
I see whet you’re implying, but there is no surprise. « et » and « er » are in nearly all cases pronounced « ay » or « é » when at the end of a word. Parler and parlé sound the same. ‘Il voudrait arriver en premier’ is an example
Tu m'as perdu 😅😂
@@Sonny_Sideup becarfull, "ait" and "er" aren't pronounce in the same way
@@MauvaisGouh Except if you are from the south^^
@@Sonny_Sideup Doesnt change the fact that the r in parler is not silent at all. If you remove the r it makes "parle" which is not the same as parlé/parler
I think when you're learning a language the most important thing is to have resources that you enjoy so that you stick to it. For French, I used the Lire en Français Facile series by hachette. They offer graded reader versions of classics such as les trois mousquetaires. And these stories really keep you motivated.
Hello ! Do you know such a resource for italian ?
And happy to know that Hachette does this with our classics, wich are in my opinion often good ( I‘m french). Happy reading :)
@@ElenaLokna. Gallimard a des éditions bilingues en plusieurs langues dont l'italien, je crois qu'il y a du Italo Calvino et du Buzzati.
Ultimately learning languages lies on a single rule : if you just learn from books, class and internet you will learn very slowly and an academical language, whereas if you practice with natives quite often you will learn better, quicker and how the actual spoken language sounds like. Whatever your target language is.
watch videos in French, with English subtitles as well. of VOSTENG in short.
The best is doing both, basically, i think learning with books/video... will make you good for writing said language, but you'll have trouble with speaking because of the spontaneity required to speak fluently a language (pronunciation isn't that big of a deal as long as people understand ) but going directly in the country and interacting with natives will make you a fluent speaker, but with (from my experience) bad/terrible writing (since most adult don't write that much, not enough to learn a language at least)
My boss at work (portugese, but live in France for 10 years or so) speak french without problem (a few bad words here and there, but even french people do that ) but couldn't write correctly in french if his life depended on it, because he simply don't write or read enough french on daily basis to learn correctly (+writing in french can be pretty tricky, as a lot of french can attest ^^ )
False the internet is a really good way with almost infinite resources. Books are great to build a better writing, vocabulary and grammar. Speaking with native is good to learn the basics and the accent
@@guifire9747 I agree except going to the country will make you a fluent speaker. You could go to a country and NEVER become fluent. Like football players who have been 10 years in France and still don't speak the language. The best option is to have the basics of the language so you can interact and not be lost THEN go to the country where the language is spoken
@@Comprends-ton-Dim Indeed, that's the most efficient way
Thank you, Olly. As semi-retired ESL teacher (who wishes he spoke French) I was impressed with your initial presentation here. I can clearly see that you are an excellent teacher and when I have the time to really get serious about learning French and giving it the time it needs in my schedule I will definitely be back. I like your idea of learning from story telling. Cheers.
Whenever the going gets tough in language learning, I always watch a few of your videos. I think your passion for your craft, paired with your humility is like a light. When surrounded by the darkness of not knowing what to do, how to approach something, where to continue, you bring up a spot light onto a path that has been there all along. Suddenly it's not so cold, and the lack of understanding is much more understandable.
Language learning is a journey that never quite ends, so of course it feels difficult, but it is possible. Thank you for all of your hard work and inspiration!!!
are you trying to learn french?
French became much easier to me after some Spanish. I tried French first, but it was too much for me then. While Spanish is much more regular and straightforward - and as a Latin language it provides a lot of hints for the French grammar (conjugations etc), and shares a lot of basic vocabulary with French.
honestly same with me but other way around! When learning french i decided to do some spanish (im no where near fluent in both) but it had def helped me with feminine and masculine verbs in spanish. i\I am trying to learn both again and I think Im going to separate them, french first then spanish afterwards.
french being my second language, i speak it fluently and have been using it ever since i was about 4 yo, and i still watch your "learning french" videos for some reason 😭 de toute façon, chapeau bas ! love your channel ! ❤️
DELIGHTFUL PRESENTATION, OLLY!
I love French. I love THE French. I love France 🇫🇷. Your upbeat, enthusiastic encouragement gives me motivation to plunge back in to diligently studying
LE BEAU LANGAGE, so that when I return
to dwell in LA BELLE FRANCE encore, I’ll be able to express to the native speakers how much I appreciate their respectful patience
I'm a French as a foreign language teacher and I will use what I learned in this video to help my beginner students.
I'm a native Spanish speaker. After learning English, I started with French and I realized English has many French words. This and my Spanish helped me a lot with my French
1066, we invaded England and brought there French.
You are right. About 30% of english words come from french.
It's all fun and games until somebody puts a direct object before the auxiliary verb "avoir", and then all hell breaks loose. ^^
😂 haha
Is the verb transitive or not ?
Is the subject active or passive in the action?
I'm Finnish and Finnish is my mother tongue. In school I studied English (starting age 9), French (11), Swedish (13) and German (14). French was definitely the hardest to learn. And the problem is also that after finishing school, you hardly ever need to use or hear French anywhere so it's easy to forget it. Same with German. Swedish is harder to forget because I hear it spoken almost daily due to Finland having a Swedish speaking minority. English is really easy to both learn and maintain because it's in every media you can think of. For example, we never dub movies or tv shows in Finnish. I guess what I'm saying is that to learn and maintain many languages at the same time is really time consuming and you must really put some effort into it. Not all of us can be naturally gifted polyglots.
Problem with Nordic countries is that they are too "anglicized" to let any place to learn other languages like French, Italian, German, etc.
Indeed if you don't have a minimum of daily media and cultural support (tv, radio, cinema, books, BD, etc.) it's then like having a bath in an empty tub.
There are literally 250 millions French native speakers and billions of French content on the internet. It's your fault if you don't follow any French media to maintain your French lol.
@@Comprends-ton-Dim I think what he means is that he has no connection to the language due to the geographics of his country. They have only two neighbours and people from abroad don´t choose Finnland as their first choice to visit when they´re doing a "EuroTrip", while you hear people talking turkish, russian, SBC; polish, dutch, french, arabic in a lot of places here in Germany. If you are looking for a language partner for any popular language, you'll find it here in almost every city which is bigger than 100,000k inhabitants.
@@grapefruitbierchen2141 100,000k inhabitants is a lot, you won't find cities with such a high population in Germany :D
Fantastic video that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Currently learning French and it's becoming easier each week.
Really nice video! I think it sums up the challenges of learning French as an English speaker. Coming from the very phonetic language of Spanish, I can relate to the feeling of overwhelm at first because of all of the silent letters and odd pronunciation, but you really do get a feel for how words are likely going to be pronounced after a little while of reading/listening. I have a long way to go, but it no longer feels overwhelming! And by the way, I enjoy your story in your French Uncovered course. I love learning through stories.
Speaking it is not that hard, especially if you learn how to read it at the same time, the hardest part I think is to write it, most french people can't even write proper french.
yeah, pronunciation and spelling are a headache at first, and in verb conjugations the fact that a lot of them have the same pronunciation, but are written differently was a big problem for me, you have to learn the conjugations mostly for writing.
Je me demande toujours pourquoi il y a des vidéos “comment apprendre le français” dans mes suggestions et pourquoi je les regarde…
Thanks Olly. I'm learning it as a hobby and a challenge. But its like a maze, I think I'm making a breakthrough then I hit a wall. But this is all part of the process. Your videos are very encouraging and clearly come from one who has a gift for language. It all helps.
What a fantastic speaker
Currently learning French and this video has affirmed my motivation to continue. Thank you.
Ah learning French. That was a fun experience. I remember learning that for all four years of high school only for me not to use it for almost ten years and then find out in France that I didn’t know much. I grew up in a bilingual home so I already can speak Portuguese. So I come to the conclusion that immersion works better for me then traditional class. And man what I difference that mentality makes, especially adding your storytelling technique.
For the past six months learning Japanese from your programs and constant immersion and so far and it’s been a fun journey. Can only read/watch lower level stuff in Japanese so far but it feels a lot more progress then four years of high school.
Already bought your French programs (plus a few others to learn in the future). Hope to learn more from your channel and whatever you have available in the future.
As a French, I am really appreciating how he is actually telling how French is hard. By the way your accent is actually very good!
I’m learning english, I always watch your videos to improve my listening, thank you so much for your videos. Saludos desde Chile 🇨🇱
hi, just found your channel some days ago (yt algorithm) and watched some vids of yours. as a native french, having learned a "socalled impossible language", Hungarian, also having been a french teacher there for some time, i appreciate your approach, and almost heard myself :) "make mistakes! the point is to communicate, you will be thanked later". Thanks, and cheers from France!
French is a bit harder than Italian and Spanish for English speakers, a lot easier than Mandarin and Korean. My forty year experience. Don't trust UA-cam videos about people who say they speak all these languages.
What do you think the easiest way is to teach yourself French?
@@xavier01110immerse yourself in the language if you can't afford to get in a french speaking area watch Tv shows and movies with subtitle to get the pronunciation then when you get to understand the word easier remove the subtitles after that you'll start speaking with french native more fluently and I recommend you to start practicing with french native online (language exchange site) then read books.
that's what I've done and I wish that I'm pretty much fluent... but I'm not cause I still lack a hell of vocabulary that I only found in my 4th and last book.
it's been 5 years since I watch each of my movies and my tv show (basically since I really started learning English).
Good luck with french that's a tough one ...
@@naweed4862 i want to learn french by myself and my first step was to play minecraft in french.
@@stuckonaslide Keep up the good work bro ; )
Bon courage à tous ceux qui apprennent le français ! 👍
Merci beaucoup
Im actually french and i was very happy to see how you try to do people learn french thanks you olly richards 😃
Perfect. I agree with all your points. I've told others, you have to know you really want to learn, and you have study/practice (a lot). There is no easy way. I was lucky to learn French by immersion, I lived in France for a year and went to school with French students, spoke only French for days on end. And i was young, that helped. Your videos are terrific, I really enjoy your presentation
The thing about French exceptions that I think is hilarious (but that might be because I'm a linguist and a French speaker) is that even our exceptions have rules. I definitely understand why it makes it super hard to learn, but between that and the history behind the language, it's pretty fascinating to learn about! Truth being told, almost half of French's difficulties are due to the fact that it's a Romance language but with far more Germanic influences than most. English, in comparison, is the other way around, a mostly Germanic language but with more Romance influences than most Germanic languages.
When it comes to pronuniciation however, I always find it funny how English people complain about the pronunciation of French when it's exactly the same for us with English. I mean, once you know all the theory of pronunciation, there are a few exceptions, but mostly, even them follow rules. However, go explain a student that "Boughs", "Through" and "Rough" are all pronounced differently xD (I'm saying that with love, I just really love languages!)
3:50 Alors petite correction. Le r de parler n’est pas muet en fait. Il se combine avec le e de devant pour former le son é
I'm so glad that I came across your channel some days ago! Recently I started learning French, and your advice is pretty helpful to me. Thanks a lot!
alors ca dit quoi le francais 7 mois plus tard ?
This was so helpful, thank you!! I noticed there are a lot of words and grammar rules that are similar to Spanish , which helps me out a lot.
As a frenchman knowing a bit of english, i can tell you that both languages are deeply interrelated. I think that french is by far the easiest foreign language to learn for a native english speaker. Although english has germanic roots too, it seems to me that the task of learning german would be much more difficult for an english speaker than the one of learning french. Roughly 50% of english has been inherited from french, since french has been the aristocratic language in England during centuries. I have been told that english has been purposely altered to differ from french once the english crown realized that the hundred years war couldn't be won. After all, it was the language of the ennemy :) . I think that it is quite easy for an english speaker to replace the ending of english adverbs to convert them to french (Apparently becomes apparemment, abruptly becomes abruptement, etc) the same goes for verbs, nouns and adjectives. Really once you get the trick, both languages become very similar. Hope this will help you to dare beginning to learn french ;) . And finally don't be afraid if your pronounciation is incorrect, french people will be so glad to see your efforts in learning their language that they will try to help rather than kidding you. They prefer an englishman speakink poor french to a person talking in english without even having asked if they understand it, this behavior being very common and considered very impolite.
All that is a “bit of english”? 🗿
@@allergictohumansnotanimals5671 I was thinking the exact same thing…
I'm a Frenchman and the way you described french is perfect exacly the problems of the French language and i've been learning English for about 8~9 years througout, games, series, films, youtube videos and other ways only 3 years in school and i didn't really learned anything lol continue your great videos ^^
As far as vocabulary is concerned, French is easy for English speakers, since about 40% of English words are French words. Not always pronounced or written the same way, but basically the same. I know an anglophone who lives in Montréal and he told me that whenever he is searching for a French equivalent of an English word, he asks himself: « What would be the complicated way of saying it in English? » Usually, the answer is the key to the French word!
By the way, you deserve congratulations for your pronunciation of « tu ». English speakers usually are in big trouble with the French « u ».
English expat in France, whenever I'm stuck I ask myself how would a posh person say this, works the majoirty of the time.
@@xdfggea88 A Brit once told me that French people sound posh when they speak English. That could be due to the fact we tend to use preferentially words the are most similar to ours.
@@Redgethechemist I thought it was because many French people learn British English
@@alpacawithouthat987 It's also a reason I guess. When I was a kid, we had to learn almost exclusively RP English, we had a few audio examples of American English or Australian English, but the most part of our sources was the BBC, this was before internet became a thing. If you wrote color, the professor would count it as a mistake. Nowadays, I think they try to teach a larger diversity of accents, but there are still elitist professors I imagine.
@@Redgethechemist Well I’m still in lycée and we are still learning British english. The teachers don’t consider American english as a mistake but they prefer the British one a lot more.
Wow ! That's a very nice video ! I'm French and all the things you're saying are pure truth, you understood how our language works ! Thanks man, I subscribe to this chanel immediately 😁
Thank you so much for making this video. I just barely started learning the language, but this video is giving me hope that one day I can be fluent in French as I am with English.
The first foreign language I learned was French and my native language is Spanish.
My first impression of the French spelling "l'ortographie" was that it is kind of similar to English but the words and grammar are similar to Spanish.
I listened and read at the same time and after several weeks recognized all the similarities between the languages. So, for me, French is easy. Moreover, I started learning English one year ago, and when I read English literature I found a lot of different words I already knew because I studied them before with Frech.
Superbe vidéo !
Je comprend mieux le français grâce à toi 👌
I just come across this on my feed and thought I'd give it listen. The points you addressed were good and to all intends and purposes true and help. As elegant and graceful as the French is, as a dyslexic, I found it an absolute nightmare to learn in school. The irregularities are what get me. I have a German girlfriend and I have found German to be much more accessible, even though I'm still not even good at that. I'm really interested in your story method and I think that could help progress my German in more fun way. Thank you for giving a way forward 😀
Well I learned french in my 5th semester in the university but don't remember it much now. I like English more than french.
French is my very best language. It's also my mother tongue 😁
Ah la la, les joies de l’algorithme UA-cam 😂
Très bonne vidéo en tout cas, de la part d’un Français 🇫🇷 !
Great advise as always and in agreement story learning is so good
I'm a Canadian who just barely knows French (mostly words learned from reading cereal boxes and such) and this was very interesting. The four tricky areas all made perfect sense to me and was very easy to understand. Really, I think the most difficult part to learn will be the grammar. Thank you for the video as I was interested in picking it up.
I started to teach myself to read & write French when I was 8. I didn’t want to wait till year 7!
I don't see the logic in what you're saying!
me too, except i was 9!
@@manfredneilmann4305
She started to teach herself the language at age 8, she did not want to wait untill she was in grade 7 where you're older.
I’ve always had a magnetic urge to learn French. It was like love at first sound when I first heard spoken French. I love the music, especially Gims, Stromae and Indila. For me, I will always be “learning” French. I will never consider myself as having arrived at perfect fluency because just as in English there are always new words and ideas to learn. My next task I have set for myself is to read all of Michel Foucault’s most famous books in the original French. After which I will probably move on to Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir or some other French philosopher. The French language for me is a part of a lifelong journey.
I can’t speak French, but I’m obsessed with Gims!!! His songs are so amazing. I can’t even remember how I stumbled upon his music, but I am so thankful. I’m a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, but I’ve been dipping my toes into French here and there. Gims’ music makes me want to learn. The song J’me Tire is so haunting and passionate. We have passionate music in the English language that I admire, but that song transcends all of that. I can’t explain it.
@@ashleymarietv2 An attractive girl who likes Spanish and French and loves listening to Gims. 😍 My question is are you single? Lol I’ve never met a girl in the U.S. who even knew who Gims was. People look at me funny when I tell them I like French music. Lol
@@nickwilsonxc haha yes I am :) people look at me funny too when I’m listening to what they consider “foreign” music, although Spanish music is becoming quite popular here in the US in the last couple of years. There’s an artist right now named Bad Bunny who’s beating all the Americans on our own charts and I’m living for it. His music is amazing!
You’re welcome to message me :)
@@ashleymarietv2 Or if it’s easier I can text you first. I don’t think there is a way to message on UA-cam though. Lol
@@nickwilsonxc do you have any social media I can add you on? I don’t think we should post our numbers out here for everyone to see lol :)
As a student I should say, this video was amazing 👌🏻
And maybe its hard but it's enjoyable to learn and useful as well
I really needed to hear this video. I need to find my inspiration to learn French again
Well I'm a french native speaker and I had this feeling that oral french is way more easier than the written french !
That's why i'm making french video (explaining some words in english) about Let's play (commenting on a game). The format is long for the aim to listen to a lot of words, who finally repeat at some point and assimilate a lot of those to be automatically produicing those words and able to understand those words.
Hello,
I am French and i am living in Paris region. To speak French perfectly while respecting the grammatical rules is very difficult even for a Frenchman. Few of us master it perfectly. The spelling rules are even more difficult because of the many exceptions.
In everyday life, the French take a lot of freedom in their way of explaining themselves and free themselves from most of the rules. As long as we understand each other, that's the most important thing.
Sorry for my very bad English accent in this post 😂😜
Thanks for the video. Keep up the great work Olly!
Nice name
In middle school I started Italian Russian and Spanish in HS and this year French but last year it was Dutch and I actually bought books in Dutch from the Netherlands and had them sent over to me here in America and it’s so cool to read a physical book in a language you’re learning. Definitely recommend reading stories or books in the language you’re learning. Really does help. Short stories or children’s book to start and progressively challenge yourself
Si tu parles 8 langues aussi bien que tu parles français, c’est vraiment incroyable !
3:13 Actually, the pronunciation of written French is very consistent. The reverse isn't true (writing down what you hear), and there's of course a lot o redundancy, but knowing the general rules for pronouncing different combinations of letters will enable a learner to pronounce 99% of French words. The few exceptions that exist are usually cases of pronouncing T's that should normally be silent.
By comparison, English lacks consistency with both text-to-speech and speech-to-text; at least French does better than English with the former. Language naturally changes with time and dialects vary, so it can be hard for writing to always match pronunciation on a transparent basis (ideally one spelling for each phoneme), although some languages do this better than others (look at Spanish and Italian).
Of course, what French has is multiple ways to spell one sound. Many other languages do the same thing to a lesser extent; look at Greek, which has 6 ways to spell the [i] sound (iotacism; ι, η, υ, ει, οι, υι). That said, there is one caveat in French: the normally-silent final consonant can appear attached to the next word when it starts with a vowel (liaison). What is essentially the same phenomenon occurs in non-rhotic English dialects, where a normally-silent final "r" (following a vowel) can appear attached to the beginning of the following word when it starts with a vowel.
Thank you Ollie, for the soothing way of addressing the anxieties of us trying to learn our 3rd foreign language. I think that’s why so many French native speakers got hooked by your la belle chaîne. What’s your 6th langue étrangère you plan to conquer ?
You are correct! Motivation is the key, the rest will follow.
In my work I had to deal with native english speakers ( and some other languages, Polish and German people as example ) a lot and some of them were trying to learn French so they would ask to only communicate in french to practice, and often ask me to correct their mistakes.
So here's some things for people learning French to not worry too much about until you get really fluent :
-the final letter being silent or not. If you pronounce it we will still understand you, some people may correct you but they'll understand.
-the different éèëê : it will very rarely confuse people if you mix two up. Even most French people don't make a difference between ê and é or between ë and just e. Maybe you'll have to repeat one or two words that will sound a bit weird but generally it'll be ok.
-Gender : it's quite cute when non native french speakers mix up gender of object, we may chuckle to it and correct you but nobody will get mad about it. Even in the example, "le beau maison" sounds weird but it's cute.
-Spelling: sooooo many french are super bad at spelling, so you can make mistakes, at least you have an excuse xD
This video is really good, but, as a frenchman, I would add a fifth point, the french grammar can be an absolute nightmare for some of english speaking people because it can be verry tricky, even sometimes for us, french people
I watched this video even though I'm French and still I found it funny to watch because all the tricky rules to learn that you mention are said to be tricky by native speakers themselves. I also think French is a bit tricky to learn and to speak but this is what makes it so beautiful!
8:00 calling us all out right there, what a teacher.
Qu'est-ce que je fais sur cette vidéo alors que je suis française 😂 honnêtement, j'ai trouvé ta vidéo super sympa à regarder ! 🥰
Je me suis dis la même chose MDR 😂
@@marionrohart4013 😂😂
Is french hard ?
French : we have genders for objects
Dutch : Indeed, but it can also be neutral, and french objects genders are not the same for us
Chinese : Wait, you have endings on the verb to know the tense of the verb ? And you say chinese is difficult
Americans : He want a Bo'o'o'woda
lol as a native french who speak a lil of english i find this joke absolutly hilarious
Dutchie here: After WW2, the distinction between male/female in words was formally abandoned, since no one was using them in the spoken language. This left Modern Dutch with only gendered ('De') and neuter ('Het') words.
Compare German which still retains all three genders: Male ('Der'), female ('Die') and neuter ('Das')
@@mickaelcoulon5604 pas compris la chute
You made me learn French easier😩THANK YOU🙏🏽
Hey you are very good on french (im french/je suis français) and your prounonciation too was very good.
I'm a native spanish speaker and have been trying to learn french lately. Even though everybody says french is related to Spanish (as well as the other romance languages) it's been really hard, specially compared to portuguese and italian, which are relatively easier for us.
Well as a french, spanish is strangely relatively easy to learn. Don't make me say what I didn't say, I'm nowhere near fluent but for example, only the fact that most of words genders are the same in the two languages helped me very much. I noticed however that there are some exceptions like "car" which is feminine in french but masculine in spanish but once you know it, it's not that hard to memory and you get used to it quite simpely. I really like spanish language, greatings from France.
@@wildwestpotato5559 Yeah, and specially the vowels pronunciation must be the easiest part of learning Spanish. For example, an "a" is always an "a". An "i" is always an "i". Basically what you read is what you say. There's no ambiguity there. In French (as well as in English) that's a bit more complicated, unless you have enough experience with it. And the accents... we only have one (at least in written form). You have like 4 or 5... so yeah it's challenging.
Cheers!
Good luck to everyone. Let's be honest guys, even we, as native French speakers, find french very hard and not easy to master.
Le mieux pour enrichir son vocabulaire, c'est de lire des livres et d'écrire le plus possible (journal intime, rédac, ce que tu veux).
the final boss is the grammar in french chatrooms. only god can decipher it.
Merci le sang maintenant je sais parler français grâce à toi. T’es le best
Your silent communication is amazing. Is that natural or a skill you enveloped ? I'm talking about your body language, hand movements. It aligns perfectly with your speech. And therefore making it even more powerfull, truthworthy for viewers. Bravo. Er norsk et av språkene du har lært ? Fantastisk video. 👌
I’m French and don’t worry guys we understand you and we know you’re learning French ❤️ :) (we notice it quite quickly anyway 😂)
As a French, I can assure you that if an English speaks to me, I can easily understand everything even if the speaker does masters the « é è ë e », or the gender, or the silent letter, and same for the « r » sound. The issue in understanding actually lies in the « C and S » because sometimes a C is pronounced as a K (contre, « kontr »), a S (cela, « sela », and a S can both be pronounced as an S (si, « si ») and Z (desire, « dezir »), and if someone mixed them, it’s where i actually start to struggle understanding.
cela is pronounced sla.
@@DerToasti no. It’s pronounced « Sela » and the « sla » is just a contraction
@@vizender find me one case where someone pronounces it sela. sela would probably be cella-là.
@@DerToasti in the commun language, people contract the world, but that does not mean that it’s usually pronounced Sela. You just have to go south of France and you’ll see everyone says it that way. Even people without the « marseillais accent ».
However, people don’t usually use the word Cela, rather using Ça.
Totalement d’accord ! Très bonne vidéo :)
Le français est ma langue maternelle. Cette vidéo est très intéressante à regarder pour prendre conscience de cette langue par votre perspective !
I don't know what it is, but I just love listening to Olly Richards talk. There's just something about his tone haha.
It's relaxing
Agreed
Also, about the end message, I can confirm : I used to dislike English because I was the worst in my class, I sucked at it SO hard you can't imagine... But then I discovered Undertale, I made the effort to check a let's play in English since I already knew it by heart, and a completely new world opened to me (there were clearly not as much content in french than there were in english) as I discovered the fandom, then Tumblr, then internet as a whole (I had no interest for social medias before) and I was so driven by passion I learned to love English at the same time, and without even realizing I became fluent
And now I'm studying it in a University to become a translator for editors.
Life sure is full of surprises. You have no IDEA how much my world grew since then, it's incredible how a new language opens you doors to new cultures, new people, new communities, I learned so much on so many things!
...
Sorry I diverged
Truly, english is a must have to communicate and see new things, hell my favorite video game english just had some title translated in french 2/3 years ago (before just japanese/english and chinese i think), i would have missed my favorite videogames if i wasn't able to speak english ^^'
Now most my games are in english to start with and i don't even bother changing the language
all the young kids are now getting fluent in english from the internet. all the best content on youtube and tiktok is in english. you almost can't avoid learning english if you're on the internet a lot. i learned it completely automatically.
Another excellent video. I started to pick up French quite naturally by the time I was in high school, between the cognates and French words imported wholesale into English, my third-year Spanish class, and the French used in English literature (e.g., Dickens). If you know anything about the history of England, you know that much of modern English comes from French. Fantastique!
Yes, up to 30 % comes from latin roots. Takes us all back. Marguerite Yourcenar in french is top-notch, Translating is betraying. But she wrote The memories of Hadrian, or something like that, that would be tthe french title (It's not half bad in french). Dickens is an english classic no one can argue with. Yourcenar is way different. You can argue, still she's pretty impressive. She can build stories too, or be poetic..This book is far from my favorite, but well worth a try.