It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
> - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh...
The same can be said about English "two", "write"?
I would say even more so: the amount of silent vowels, silent consonants in English is rather puzzling for someone coming from a Brazilian Portuguese background.
I still remember as a kid trying to get by the concept of not saying the S in "island" or just ignoring the K in "knight", "know" and "knowledge" or G in "align" and "design".
I studied English as a kid and then French, German and Spanish as a teenager and early 20s. In the "pronunciation from written form" department, Spanish is spectacular: an absurdly regular language in this department. German was unexpectedly regular and quite manageable to grasp in my experience. French coming in third place but yet shows some rather high degree of consistency — once you get the gist it coming with a close-enough pronunciation from the written form is doable for a new learner of the language.
I would not say the same applies to English, and the amount of loan words it takes from other languages doesn't make it any easier to someone learning it.
> And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
Again, dialects/accents variations are not a French exclusivity. I understand you are not comparing say inter-country variations (like Irish accent vs a Texan accent, Quebecois vs Parisian French ) but rather intra-country variations, but yet, Northern Germany German and its Souther variations are quite distinct.
> - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
> - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level.
Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers.
The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
That's true, but probably irrelevant for English speakers. English is possibly the only language that is worse than French in that respect. And there are English accents too.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.