One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France fo

One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France for a few years, and I was initially surprised that after a few months of working hard at it, I could still sometimes understand Spanish and Italian a little more easily than French (even though I don't speak them at all), just because they have per-word stress like English, but French is unusual (for Europe at least) in having per-phrase stress (not sure of the technical term for that, but I'm sure it's a thing). That was extremely frustrating. But it passed... I'd say it took about 3-4 months of immersion to learn enough stock phrases (waiters say "Vous désirez ?" and other stock protocol phrases you just get used to) and common slang, and train my ear to understand the way words melt into each other (liaisons in real life, omitted words, strange sound transformations that no one ever tells you about... I like the aspiration that appears at the end of some words in the Paris accent, I do it myself, but I can't tell you the rule for it). You just can't learn that stuff from a book or whatever. I think I was relatively good at it (at least, much better than the other English speakers in our circle, but not as good as a couple of others whose foreignness I couldn't hear at all, so they knew tricks I didn't), and I put that down to vast amounts of immersive discussion in real life and also on IRC, where I could see people transcribing what they actually say.