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French is basically the same as any romance language. It is a little trickier for native English speakers to pronounce than Spanish, but that is really the only
by efficax 9y ago
French is basically the same as any romance language. It is a little trickier for native English speakers to pronounce than Spanish, but that is really the only difference. Its grammar is basically the same as Spanish, Portugese, Romanian, and it has regular spelling rules and consistent pronounciation rules for the most part. The nasal vowels are tricky for English speakers, but you get the hang of it pretty fast.
- joezydeco 9y agoSpanish has one advantage: nouns come with gender built in. You don't have to memorize it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- candeira 9y agoI'm teaching Spanish (my native language) to my daughters and my wife, and I disagree. There are many, many nouns that don't mark the gender except in the accompanying article or adjective.
- 3131s 9y agoAnd some that contradict the rule, i.e. 'agua' among other nouns in certain circumstances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes
- flatline 9y agoLots of little mnemonics, like man creates el problema, the woman la solution.
- chimeracoder 9y agoThose are both pretty easy, too, because they follow regular rules. "-ma" is always masculine. "-ión" is always feminine.
- ldv0107 9y agoActually, “rama” (branch), “cama” (bed), “mucama” (maid) are all femenine. “Centurión” (roman military rank) and “esturión” (fish) are masculine
- candeira 9y agoCorrect. "tema", "teorema" are masculine because they are cultisms, derived directly from greek. Same with "fantasma" and "miasma".
- singularity2001 9y agobad 'reason': problema is greek too ⲡⲣⲟⲃⲗⲏⲙⲁ 🇬🇷 problem
- candeira 9y agoAnd it's masculine too in Spanish. Isn't it in Greek?
- chimeracoder 9y ago"agua" doesn't break the rule. It's feminine. agua fría. However, there's another rule that words beginning with an a use el because of the double vowel sound.
- mtr 9y ago"Abuela"? "Azúcar" "Abuela"?
- candeira 9y agoThat's almost correct. It's not all words starting with 'a', but words staring with a _stressed_ 'a', like "águila", "aula" and "hacha" that use "el" as an article, despite being feminine words. The reason is analogous to the use of "an" in English instead of the article "a".
- WillPostForFood 9y agoThere may be exceptions, but noun gender is still vastly more consistent than French.
- ashark 9y agoGod, strongly agree. My worse-than-a-coinflip skill at getting French gender correct on nouns that aren't very familiar too me is one of the big things keeping me from returning to it. Deeply discouraging. Thanks to easy rules, I can get Spanish nouns right every time unless I run into one of the exceptions (seemingly all French nouns are an exception to whichever of the dozen or so "rules" they're failing to follow). I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse. For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often. [EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll
- mjevans 9y agoThat's actually why I had so much trouble with it. I feel that every language with this "feature" is wrong. They need to be normalized in to a more proper form where there is no implicit gender for words. Much like I prefer letter forms with less embellishments.
- megaman22 9y agoFrench is particularly egregious. There is no rhyme or reason to it. It's mildly hilarious when speaking with french speakers that only ever learned gutter english, so that all manner of sexless objects aquire genders, and are frequently referred to as being fornicated with by other bizarrely sexed objects.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bipson 9y agoMy native language is a German dialect, I grew up talking Portuguese, learned French in school for 5 years, 3 years of Spanish and I strongly disagree. The French language is full of irregularities and weird, complicated sentence constructions (try to negate something in a conditional past tense), and worst of all, so many flowers of speech, that francophones love to show off.
- jjgreen 9y ago"Flowers of speech" is not, as far as I know, idiomatic English, but it should be: fantastic!
- bshimmin 9y agoIt's very close to the idiomatic "flowery speech"!
- singularity2001 9y agoflowers related to flavors?
- apendleton 9y agoThis list is a measure of difficulty for native English speakers, specifically, for whom some of the complexities in French you mention are offset by a comparatively larger shared vocabulary as compared to Spanish (thanks, William the Conqueror).