Even if you haven’t started learning French, you probably have no trouble translating the motto of France: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
Yes, the translation is “liberty, equality, fraternity” —here, the term “fraternity” refers to “brotherhood,” not the fraternity houses in college, which had parties.
A look at the thousand most common French words, might give you a feeling of “déjà vu.” That impression of having already seen some of them is because many resemble their English translations.
Part of what makes French a relatively easy language to learn (for English speakers) is precisely this:
French vocabulary has many words that are easy to memorize because they are similar to English.
All those similar vocabulary words may seem surprising given that English is a Germanic language (together with German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages, like Norwegian), whereas French is a Romance language (alongside Spanish and Italian, among others).
Well, there is a historical reason that explains a large part of these similar words. It is the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
At that time, the Normans (who spoke a dialect of French) brought their language to England. French became, for several centuries, the language of the English court. During that period, many French words entered the English language.
For example, the English word “difficult” comes from French. It displaced the Middle English word “earveþ” (a rather difficult-looking word, indeed).
Before 1066, learning French as an English speaker would have been much harder. Not only because the printing press wasn’t yet invented (so French textbooks were less widely available) but also because there was much less vocabulary overlap between the two languages.
When English speakers learn French, one of the things they find most difficult is grammatical gender. In French, every noun has a grammatical gender (either masculine or feminine).
This is the case for nouns that refer to physical objects (like a table or a chair), and it is also the case for nouns that refer to an abstract notion (like freedom or beauty).
Native French speakers intuitively know the gender of each French noun without even having to think about it. But it doesn’t come naturally to those who are learning French.
Those who are learning French are puzzled by the fact that the grammatical genders of French words are often completely uncorrelated with the meaning of those words.
For example, the French term for “masculinity” (la masculinité) has the feminine grammatical gender, and the French term for “feminism” (le féminisme) has the masculine grammatical gender.
Thankfully, there are some patterns between the ending of French words and their grammatical genders.
But these patterns are much more complicated than the patterns in Spanish or Italian (where nouns often end in ‘a’ or ‘o’)
Some languages, like Spanish and Italian, are fairly phonetic —which means that the spelling of words closely matches the way they are pronounced.
But French is not a very phonetic language (neither is English, by the way).
Plenty of French words have silent letters. Those silent letters are not pronounced, but leaving them out while writing leads to spelling mistakes, and pronouncing them while reading leads to incorrect pronunciation.
In most cases, those silent letters come from the spelling of the word in the ancient language from which it originated (usually that ancient language is Latin).
For example, in the French word for “peace” (which is spelled “paix”), the final ‘x’ is not pronounced. That French word comes from the Latin term “pax,” where the letter ‘x’ at the end was pronounced.
If you are a native English speaker, then French is one of the easier languages to learn.
The Foreign Service Institute, based on its experience teaching languages to diplomats, classifies languages into four groups based on their learning difficulty (for English speakers).
French is in the easiest group alongside other languages that are relatively similar to English, for example, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Norwegian.
They estimate that it takes about 750 class hours (which represents 30 weeks at a rather intensive rate) to reach a “General Professional Proficiency” in French.