Hi.
I was hoping this title would get your attention, it would either frustrate you because you might think, no, French is really difficult, this person doesn’t know what she’s talking about! Alternatively you might have clicked on this because you agree with me. Either way, here you are. What I should have said is, French is an easy language for me. It all depends on the person. However if you want to make a linguistic evaluation of all languages, you could categorise some as being more difficult than others and you could back up your reasoning by giving examples of certain complicated grammar concepts and pronunciation rules, that exist in one language and not in another. For example, you could argue, and it has been argued that Japanese is one of the most difficult languages in the world because it has 3 writing systems. You could say that Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, are all really difficult because they have many gramatical cases. You could argue that Mandarin and Thai, and any language with a tonal system are the most difficult to speak. If you do an internet search on what is the most difficult language to learn, you’ll get similar results, Japanese, Korean, possibly Hungarian. So yes, there is a general consensus on what are the more difficult languages. However, as far as an individual who is trying to learn 1 or 2 languages goes, it really depends on where they’re from for one thing. For example, the French seem to find Spanish and Italian easier than English or German because Spanish and Italian are in the same language family as French. A lot of native-English speakers seem to find Spanish the easiest. I have also met people who find German easier than French, they say it is more logical. So if you want to get into languages, either for a hobby, or maybe for a career, and you’re merely interested in which one would be the easiest to start with, bear the following in mind. I haven’t looked into every single language in existence, but I’ve looked up a fair few and these are my observations, these are only based on my own personal research:
1. A romance language, such as French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, or Portuguese would be the easiest to start with in my opinion. These 5 languages have no case system, for information on a case system, see my article on how a case system works. Therefore, you can start to form basic sentences fairly easily without worrying whether the noun is in the accusative, dative, genitive etc.
2. As I’ve studied French and Spanish to an advanced level, I can make a direct comparison between them as regards ease of learning.
Note the following:
A. French and Spanish have the same number of tenses, however in French, some of these tenses are considered archaic, and are only found in old literary works, therefore the learner isn’t required to know them by heart.
B. In Spanish, these tenses that are archaic in French, such as the imperfect subjunctive, and the Pluperfect subjunctive, are necessary to form certain important constructions that are still in use. Take the following sentences. English: If I had money I would buy a car. French: si j’avais de l’argent, j’achèterais une voiture. The construction in French is, si, meaning if, plus imperfect indicative plus conditional. The learner will already know the imperfect from having probably learnt sentences such as, quand j’étais plus jeune, j’allais au cinéma. When I was younger, I used to go to the cinema. So the learner already knows the imperfect, so all they have to do now is learn the present conditional mood. After learning how to form the conditional, all they need to do is learn the formula, si plus imperfect, plus conditional. Easy, or well it was for me at least. Take note of the sentence in Spanish now. Si tuviera dinero, compraría un coche. So the formula in Spanish is, si plus imperfect subjunctive, plus present conditional. So not only does the learner have to learn the conditional mood, but they have to learn the imperfect subjunctive, a completely new tense, with different verb endings and verb stem changes, and there’s no getting away from it since as I’ve just demonstrated, it is a tense which is used regularly. Take another sentence. English, If I had had money, I would have bought a car. French, si j’avais eu de l’argent, j’aurais acheté une voiture. So the construction in French is, si plus pluperfect indicative, plus past conditional. Sure a bit more difficult I’ll admit, since you have to learn another 2 tenses. But check this out in Spanish. Si hubiera tenido dinero, habría comprado un coche. The construction is, si plus pluperfect subjunctive, plus past conditional. So as well as having to learn the pluperfect indicative in case you want to say something like, I had already finished when she came in, ya había terminado cuando ella entró, you have to also learn the pluperfect subjunctive as demonstrated above.
C. If starting French and Spanish at the same time, you may well find Spanish easier because of the following factors:
I. When learning verbs, learning personal pronouns isn’t essential because every ending changes to denote the person doing the action, so the subject pronouns aren’t necessary all the time, they are only needed to express emphasis. So you can learn the verb to go, ir, voy, vas, va, vamos, vais, van, without worrying about the pronouns all the time. Note, the pronouns still have to be learnt, especially the difference between all the forms of you.
II. Forming the negative in Spanish, is easier than in French, when wanting to say not, for example, I do not eat, the word no is used, and it is placed before the conjugated verb. No como. However in French, the learner has to remember the subject, and there are 2 parts to the negative, ne and pas. Ne goes after the subject, then you have the conjugated verb, then pas. For example, je ne mange pas, I don’t eat, or I’m not eating.
III. The Plural formation of nouns is much easier in Spanish than it is in French. To form the plural in Spanish you add -es if the singular form of the noun ends in a consonant, and you add -s if it ends in a vowel. In French is a lot more difficult, nouns are grouped together into 4 or 5 different groups of endings, for example nouns that end in X or F are the same in the plural.
IV. Forming the feminine of nouns and adjectives is easier in Spanish than in French. In Spanish you add an A to the masculine form, in French there are more endings to learn.
V. Gender of nouns is easy to determine in Spanish, the basic rule is, if the noun ends in O it is masculine, if it ends in A, it is feminine, there are only a handful of exceptions to this rule. If the noun ends in a consonant it is usually masculine.
Note: I haven’t included examples here because I just want to give a brief overview of the main differences of French and Spanish. I plan to cover specific points of grammar concerning these languages in more detail in future entries.
D. Spanish has 2 verbs for to be, French only has one, make of that what you will.
E. The use of the subjunctive varies between French and Spanish.
F. Note the conditional constructions when you want to say,, if I were you, it’s not the same construction in both languages.
G. Spanish is a phonetic language, French isn’t.
H. For me, although Spanish is a phonetic language, I personally feel more comfortable writing in French. My theory about this is because I find French pronunciation a lot easier than Spanish, I can therefore write more fluently somehow in French than in Spanish. Spanish has a rolled R, as so many languages do, which I can’t do, the French R is in the back of the throat, and isn’t rolled. French is the only language I’ve ever learnt where I have actually mastered the pronunciation to a reasonable standard, and not sounded completely like a British person when speaking. Now for the fun stuff…
3. So you’ve learnt 1 or 2 romance languages to an advanced level, and you decide to learn another. Sorry to disappoint you but, you’re not as brainy as you’d like to think. If you learn Spanish to an advanced level, try and read a newspaper in Portuguese, I’ll guarantee you you’ll understand a lot of what you read. I did an experiment once. I hardly knew any Portuguese, still don’t as it happens, but anyway I thought I’d try and look for Portuguese news articles through google. So I found a couple, I understood most of the words and I’m not joking. This isn’t because I’m a genious, it’s because Spanish and Portuguese are morphologically so similar. Phonetically they are not though. Try listening to Spanish radio, then Portuguese, then you’ll see why. Italian is a mixture of French and Spanish, although if you read an Italian newspaper and don’t know Italian, you maybe thrown by the words since plural formation is not the same as in Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Catalan is a mix of Spanish and French, Romanian which I haven’t covered before is different in that a lot of vocabulary comes from slavic roots and not Latin as do the other romance languages, and Romanian also has a case system. Incidentally if you know Latin, you won’t have trouble learning another romance language. What I’m trying to say is, once you’ve learnt 1 or 2 languages from the same language group, the rest in that group will come easier to you and you’ll be able to learn them quickly. In fact, if you’re anything like me, you might get bored of the lack of a challenge and want to try something else, hence my interest in German and Finnish, and basically anything that’s non-romance language related.
4. To learn any language with a case system and be able to get it up to an advanced level, you have to know how a case system works, otherwise you won’t get anywhere. So before learning German, learn about grammar in general, in particular what a direct object is etc. Learn to identify each part of a sentence in English or your native language whatever that may be, before starting.
5. If you find German too difficult, try Dutch or Afrikaans, the word order in Dutch and Afrikaans is similar to German, but they don’t have a case system. Dutch, Afrikaans and German are in the same language group as English.
6. Any language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet such as Greek, Arabic, Russian, will be more difficult to learn. It’s not impossible, I know the Greek alphabet, it’s only 24 letters, and Greek is a phonetic language.
7. Greek and Russian have a case system, both use different alphabets and they are both in different language groups.
8. Finnish has a case system too, yeh that’s the one with 15 cases, and even to form a simple sentence you have to know which verb takes which case and the fact that verbs can change their meaning depending on which case their direct object takes. It also has 5 infinitives, consonant gradation and vowel harmony, but Finnish is a language I want to deal with properly in another entry.
9. Any tonal language is difficult, well at least they are for me, but I’d say that any language where a word can change meaning depending on the way you say it, is more difficult than a language where it doesn’t matter so much how you say something.
10. Any language where each word is a character, and when you learn a new word, you also have to learn a new character. Mandarin is like this, incidentally so are all tonal languages, so the writing system, plus the fact that Mandarin is a tonal language, makes Mandarin pretty difficult I’d say.
11. For me personally, the hardest language I’ve tried is Mandarin because of its tones, I gave up, and at the time I couldn’t find a suitable way to write Mandarin on the computer, and am still investigating different options from time to time concerning this.
12. I think a lot of whether a language is easy depends on the learner’s motivation to want to learn the language in question or not. Someone who loves Turkey and the Turkish language, is more likely to find Turkish easier than French, even though gramatically Turkish is a lot more difficult than French.
Good luck with which ever language you decide to try or are currently learning. If you want to start off with a language which someone else says is difficult, just go for it. A lot of when people say one language is more difficult than another is based on opinion and experience of learning and personal ability, a lot of people often can’t back up their claims with good examples of grammar, phonology and morphological comparison, and sometimes I think they also base their claims on personal preference, personal preference is totally invalid in this case in my opinion. One language maybe hard for someone and easy for someone else.
Tara.
Filed by tara at 12:41 am under Français 
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