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5 Reasons Why Learning French is Easier than You Think

Have you heard that French is hard to learn? Genders, Conjugations, Pronunciation …. all sounds complicated? I am a Japanese who know English and leaned French from zero. From my experience, learning French is not as difficult as we imagine.

Here are 5 reasons why we don’t need to have fears to learn French at all.

1. Plenty of same vocabulary with English

French and English share plenty of vocabulary. If you know English, it’s a big advantage to start learning French. Sometimes, when you don’t know how to say in French, say it in English with french pronunciation works!

 

2. Grammar is not very different from English

French is a Romance language and English is a Germanic language. So there are some different concepts in grammar. However, it is not that different compared to many other languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish, etc. So if you know English, you already know the basic. If you know other Romance languages like Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, it will be even easier to learn French.

 

3. Conjugations are simple in spoken French

You think that you need to memorise all 6 varieties of conjugations for each verb and it make you headache? It is true that there are 6 forms in written French, however, many verbs are pronounced exactly the same for 4 forms (first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, and third person plural) despite written forms are different.

Moreover, “Nous” is usually replaced to “On” which is the third person singular form, so only the second person plural form become different pronunciation in the end!

Example: present form of the verb <parler> (speak)
Je parle
Tu parle
Il parle
Nous parlons —>On parle
Vous parlez
Ils parlent

*“parle” and “parlent” are pronounced the same

 

4. Pronunciation follow the rule

While there are many rules to memorize to pronounce correctly, it follows the rule most of the time. 
Do you know that English pronunciation has too many exception and it is not consistent at all? For example, why can’t you pronounce “through” like you do in the word “enough, rough, tough”, or why do you sometimes pronounce “read” as “red”?
So for French, once you learned the rule, it’s easy to read in correct pronunciation. 

 

5. Tons of study material

France is the country of arts and rich in culture. There are a lot of movies, books, magazines, music and it’s easy to find them. Just pick up any materials interesting to you. You can learn and enjoy at the same time.

 

Do you feel less scary to learn French now? Of course, it takes effort to learn any languages, but don’t give up to learn a language just because it seems hard. It may not be as difficult as you imagine.

Lastly, try our app LingoCards to make your learning easier.