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I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one e

I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all. My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United States, Central and South America. And once you speak Spanish, French comes rather easy (with the benefit of Italian and Portuguese becoming almost trivial).

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DanielStraight 12y ago
French is an official language in 29 countries and spoken by more than 200 million people. It's probably the most widely learned foreign language after English. It's also one of the top 10 languages on the internet. I'm genuinely curious why you would call it a dying language.
- KhalilK 12y ago
  French is a really, really, really formal language! It's perfect to use in literature because it's kind of "pretentious". But on a daily basis, you'd find that the rules are simply not worth it.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  That figure includes partial speakers , so people who learned a little French in school but probably have a much better knowledge of say English. With the exception of France most countries that legitimately speak French as the main language are either tiny or third world.
  - DanielStraight 12y ago
    Being spoken in the least developed countries seems more like a plus for French than a minus. As those countries develop, French will become even more important (assuming they still speak French). A language like German on the other hand will never experience this kind of organic growth because pretty much everywhere that speaks German is already well developed (and has negative or near-zero population growth, which certainly isn't helping the language grow).
    - jiggy2011 12y ago
      Examples of French speaking countries would be Rwanda, Congo, Niger and Madagascar. You could be waiting a very long time for these to become significant economies.
      - Jacqued 12y ago
        There are many more than that though. Basically you can draw a line from Congo to Algeria, and every country west of that line speaks French. There are 4 exceptions : Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That still leaves a huge pool of speakers. Probably not enough to make it the 'most spoken language in the world by 2050'[0] because it is mostly spoken by educated and urban people, and far less in the countryside, but enough to make it a dynamic, growing language. [0] : http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/want-to-know-the-language-of-the-future-the-data-suggests-it-could-be-french/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/w...
        vacri 12y ago
        Well, it's more that French is an official language of those countries, rather than those countries speak French. WP has a list where most of those countries have only around 10%[1] of the population that can speak French. Given that French isn't particularly popular in the world of business (English and Chinese rule there) and that English seems to have become the default in science and engineering, it seems an assumption that a growing African economy would retain its French as it's primary 'international' language. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_is_an_official_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_...
  - Tiktaalik 12y ago
    Don't forget Montreal. It's the 8th largest city in North America. It has a rich history of bilingualism, but it's essentially French speaking.
    - refurb 12y ago
      My understanding is that 80% of people in Montreal use English as their primary language.
      - Tiktaalik 12y ago
        Your understanding is not consistent at all with the government census stats. French only at home: 56%. English only at home: ~10%. French mainly + other climbs higher. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/2011001/tbl/tbl7-eng.cfm http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-... It also doesn't seem true that Allophones (born not speaking English or French) necessarily are using English the most as their 2nd language. Allophones using French most often at home is increasing over time. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/lang/provs.cfm#frequently http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/c... Going outside Montreal will yield 90%+ French speakers.
      - my_username_is_ 12y ago
        I would also offer my anecdote to the statistics that Tiktaalik provided based on a few trips to Montreal and French Canada over the last couple years--while it's true that many people speak English as well as French, English seems to be popular because of the large number of English speaking tourists that visit the city (in no small part because of its French culture). Even in the touristy areas you're greated with "Bonjour-hello" to see how you choose to respond. There were a few times I've been grateful to have some background in French, as the person I was talking to didn't know any English (this however, was mostly on the outskirts of Montreal and in smaller towns). Overall, I was surprised at how francophone the city/region as a whole were, as before traveling I had anticipated it being equally French and English.
      - bodyfour 12y ago
- VeejayRampay 12y ago
  Because we're dying as a world power. It's the cycle of history. We're slowing riding the wave of our past glory toward oblivion. Most of the countries in Africa who used to speak French are now switching to other languages like Swahili, Lingala or Wolof, the Belgian, the Swiss and the Québécois all speak French and English, it's only a matter of time. You can bring up figures and number of speakers, it won't change the fact that we're not relevant as a linguistic group in the world and unlike the other European powers, we haven't yet made the vital switch to having a strong command of English. It's really depressing.
  - dreamweapon 12y ago
    Arguably, it was only after France's inevitable and necessary[1] retreat from the global power sphere that it's "real" source of power -- it's way of living, and vernacular culture -- began to really flourish, and be genuinely appreciated on the global stage. You "lost" Indochina and Algeria, pretty much all of your "possessions" everywhere else. But in return you got Houellebecq, Goddard, the Gainsbourgs, Hardy, Dutronc, Pussycat, etc (and the world finally discovered Brassens). And now we all eat brie and goat cheese. What's not to like? [1] In the sense that the retreats of all colonial powers, including the current crop, are inevitable and necessary.
danso 12y ago
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their jobs and to me everday, and it's still off. I took French in high school just because most everyone else was taking Spanish...that was not a good attempt at rebelling :). I do love the language though, but liking it has no relation to having the discipline to be fluent in it...having situations where you need to speak it is the key factor, and that's not a frequent situation in the States. Still, I'm almost certain that if I hadn't taken French (or Spanish), I would've never known what the nuance of something like the subjunctive mood, in French or in English, and I like thinking through sentence structure when writing and reading...not sure if that casual academic pleasure offers the same level of brain benefits the OP refers to.
- watwut 12y ago
  I am neither native French not English speaker who learned both (although I forgot a lot of French ever since). English is much easier in the beginning, but it is very hard to really master it. Prepositions are main culprit, it is basically random system. French is harder in the beginning (conjugations/ le vs la), but gets easier and more systematic afterwards.
- AYBABTME 12y ago
  I'd say English is simpler than French because it doesn't have as many arbitrary exceptions. To begin, English doesn't give genders to every idea. English has much fewer irregular verbs. Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés? I'm no authority on the subject, but here's what I gathered: during la Renaissance, some aristocrats made a game of overly complexifying the language such that the plebe couldn't understand what they were saying. Or just grabbing ideas that look good (participe passé) from other languages (Italian), then sticking to them (while Italian apparently got rid of this silly construction). Also, the basis for French evolution is how authors use the language. The Académie Française looks at what famous authors have written and then use that to define what's proper French, what's not. While this is not stuff I've researched (only what I've heard from French profs justifying our usage of insane constructs); those are what I believe make for French a worst language to learn than English. My wife studied both French and English as second language and found English to be much easier to learn than French. My personal opinion is biased since I'm a native French speaker, but still nowaday I find French to be much more cumbersome than English.
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flatline 12y ago
It could certainly be worse - there are no declensions.
dreamweapon 12y ago
Well it's dead to you, obviously. My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language is, in numerical terms. Or what will come of that language 500 years from now. What matters is what experiences open up to you, as individual, when you go visit (and live) in those countries, in this life, right. It's the people you meet -- and become friends with, perhaps fall in love and start a family with -- and the literature, the music, and poetry that keeps reading and listening into the dead of night and into your dreams -- that matter. Not the gender/case system, of the fact that can speak some generic version of it in 54 countries. In that sense nearly every (major) language community is infinite, and unique. Maybe the one that's most meaningful for you will be a globally dominant language, like Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic. Or maybe it will something far more "marginal", like Basque or Pashto. But whichever it ends up being: whether that language is "alive" or "dead" to you will be a direct function of the energy and enthusiasm you invest in learning it, and (correspondingly) your love for the people who speak it, and their culture. And not a function of whether you can go to a Barnes and Noble right now and find a shelf with 50 (mostly) mediocre books and interactive learning tools for it.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  I was giving you the benefit of the doubt until you put Arabic in the same category as Mandarin or Spanish. Vernacular Arabic is as much a single language as vernacular Germanic. Not at all. Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin. [Incredibly vulgar abuse] Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English.
  - contingencies 12y ago
    Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. I agree, this is good advice. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English. Useless in career - not necessarily. Useless in life - definitely untrue.
11001 12y ago
Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.
- g8oz 12y ago
  >>if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish. Only if you want to work for the federal government or in the decidedly non dynamic province of Quebec.
  - aroberge 12y ago
    New Brunswick is officially a bilingual province. There are lots of opportunities for bilingual (French/English) speakers in Ontario as well.
  - subb 12y ago
    Non dynamic?
    - the_duck 12y ago
      Non dynamic: >From 2000 to 2009, no province had lower so-called “firm entry” than Quebec. In fact, in the manufacturing, retail, transportation and finance sectors, more companies went away than were created. No other province had that level of “destruction” without the customarily accompanying “creative.” http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-quebec-business-is-closed/ http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-quebec-business-...
  - SG- 12y ago
    Pretending Quebec is a small province, it also helps a lot to work in Ontario near Ottawa.
sampo 12y ago
> I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. According to this classification, French is actually in the easiest category of foreign languages to learn, for an English speaker: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
bpyne 12y ago
Interesting change going on in language education. I'm a coordinator for my daughter's elementary school's after school program. I wanted to bring in foreign languages so I started with Spanish because of the large Spanish speaking population (plenty of people to practice with) around our area. I partnered with the foreign language department at a nearby college to get some Spanish education students to teach: they received credit while we received free instruction. The head of the department developed the learning modules with her students. The modules were all cultural - music, food and dining, art, literature, etc. - and emphasized vocabulary and phrases associated with the particular cultural lesson. The department head told me that modern language instruction is no longer about learning rules and exceptions, which is how I was taught French, rather it's about getting kids to use language practically as soon as possible. An interesting side note is that the department head and her students consciously stayed away from the culture of Spain itself and focused on the countries of people in our area - Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, and Columbia. Learning, in general, seems to have changed away from rote learning of rules to "let's get the students doing something practical right away so they get excited about learning". My daughter's music teacher is a fairly recent graduate of Berklee Music College's music education program. When my daughter showed up for her first lesson, she had to pick a song she liked. He had her playing it - albeit crudely - by the end of the hour. She was excited and wanted to play more. When I learned drums I don't think I could play to an actual song for my first year. I had to go through hours of practicing rudiments - basic patterns to develop coordination - before applying them to anything. I think we're learning more about how people learn. I'm hopeful that "older dogs will be learning new tricks" thanks to teaching methods better aligned with how we learn.
aikah 12y ago
I'm french and I agree,the language is bloated and too complicated. English might be difficult for a french native that didnt learn it at young age like me but it's much more simple than french. I wonder though why french is that complicated,in some other countries you have the official language and dialects,but often the core of the official language is tiny,so if one sticks to that core one will write correct sentences.It feels like modern french is the result of trying to shove every french dialects into the core,resulting in the bloat it is today. Canadian french seems less bloated.They often use old french expressions,which is good because,many expressions in modern french from France just dont make sense,or words have their meaning abused. And Canadian french seems more able to extend itself from its core,instead of using english words like french from France do.French from France definetly doesnt "scale". It's just my opinion.
- renox 12y ago
  > I wonder though why french is that complicated, Mostly simple really: 1) French has a long history so a long time to accumulate warts 2) (nearly) each time, someone tries to remove some of these warts, purists scream loudly. Why politicians listen to purists instead of thinking that reducing French's complexity could help foreign people learning French is the thing I wonder though..
- bane 12y ago
  Well, having the Académie française doesn't help the language evolve much! Language should change over time, take on loanwords, simplify grammatical structures, etc. When they don't, they tend to get passed by by more dynamic languages. One thing we're definitely learning is that adding lots of loanwords to a language does not mean that the language is becoming the same as the source of the loanwords. It's just becoming a newer version of itself. And eliminating baggage doesn't mean the language is no longer "pure", it's just making room in the language for new ideas.
  - jjgreen 12y ago
    Bof, French does change, all of the time, and the Académie française only codifies and regularises these changes 30 years later -- it is irrelevant to the development of the language. What is different is that 'loanwords' are frenchified almost immediately, my favourite example being the regular -er verb 'liker', to like on Facebook, je like, tu likes, il like, nous likons, ...
epaladin 12y ago
Seven years of "learning" French in school. I was more conversant in Japanese after a week. French has two non-exceptions to verb conjugation "rules". Japanese has two exceptions. That was a lot of wasted time and I wish there had been more alternatives offered.
terrn 12y ago
This is such a sad thing to think about. Truthfully almost all languages outside of English, Mandarin, and Spanish will eventually die out. But for me learning a second language has never been about practicality, if it was I already needn't bother knowing anything but English. I've been studying Japanese for 12 years now just for the way I can think about things completely differently, and for the way it sounds. I started with French in school and after I feel more solid in my Japanese I plan to go back to it (this could never happen, Japanese is fantastically difficult). As a language lover it is very disheartening to see the inevitability of the decline in human expression through language.
- Omniusaspirer 12y ago
  On the flip side, it's important to consider that different languages are arguably the largest barrier to anyone looking to experience another culture. While different languages have the novelty factor it also prevents you from fully being able to engage individuals in conversation and really get to know them. This isn't an issue if you're only encountering two or maybe even 3 languages, but when you truly take a global perspective you're looking at French, English, Mandarin, Swahili, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, German, Portugese, Spanish, and Russian. And that's only the big ones I know off the top of my head! Learning new languages is great and I have no desire to see them completely forgotten, but I think when push comes to shove having one global language is absolutely preferable to the current mess we have.
epsylon 12y ago
That's a pretty poor advice. (I'm French myself.) French is pretty widely used (as a native language, and as a learned language as well) and very relevant in today's economy. But moreover, learn French if you want to! If you find it fun, just do it. If you already speak English, you can already communicate with a huge chunk of the world's population. Any language you learn besides that is bonus! (I am currently learning Norwegian on my own, just for the fun of it. There is little interest for me in doing that besides curiosity and the sheer pleasure of expanding my language skills.)
bodyfour 12y ago
Another thing that is hard in French (at least for me) is listening comprehension. For example, I know many more French words than German ones. Not quite enough to read very much (someday, I hope!) but if I were handed a text in French and German, I'd definitely get more out of the French half. When it comes to hearing the languages it's reversed. In German, I can spot the words I do know in a spoken sentence and hope to work out the rest of the meaning from them. In French, between the liaisons and the low degree of syllable emphasis I probably couldn't even tell you how many words there were, much less what any of them were! (The exception is in language instruction videos where they carefully enunciate each word one-by-one, but nobody speaks French like that in real life) I know that with practice picking apart French sentences would become second-nature, but it's a bit of a barrier.

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DanielStraight 12y ago

French is an official language in 29 countries and spoken by more than 200 million people. It's probably the most widely learned foreign language after English. It's also one of the top 10 languages on the internet. I'm genuinely curious why you would call it a dying language.

KhalilK 12y ago
French is a really, really, really formal language! It's perfect to use in literature because it's kind of "pretentious". But on a daily basis, you'd find that the rules are simply not worth it.
jiggy2011 12y ago
That figure includes partial speakers , so people who learned a little French in school but probably have a much better knowledge of say English. With the exception of France most countries that legitimately speak French as the main language are either tiny or third world.
- DanielStraight 12y ago
  Being spoken in the least developed countries seems more like a plus for French than a minus. As those countries develop, French will become even more important (assuming they still speak French). A language like German on the other hand will never experience this kind of organic growth because pretty much everywhere that speaks German is already well developed (and has negative or near-zero population growth, which certainly isn't helping the language grow).
  - jiggy2011 12y ago
    Examples of French speaking countries would be Rwanda, Congo, Niger and Madagascar. You could be waiting a very long time for these to become significant economies.
    - Jacqued 12y ago
      There are many more than that though. Basically you can draw a line from Congo to Algeria, and every country west of that line speaks French. There are 4 exceptions : Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone. That still leaves a huge pool of speakers. Probably not enough to make it the 'most spoken language in the world by 2050'[0] because it is mostly spoken by educated and urban people, and far less in the countryside, but enough to make it a dynamic, growing language. [0] : http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/want-to-know-the-language-of-the-future-the-data-suggests-it-could-be-french/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/w...
      - vacri 12y ago
        Well, it's more that French is an official language of those countries, rather than those countries speak French. WP has a list where most of those countries have only around 10%[1] of the population that can speak French. Given that French isn't particularly popular in the world of business (English and Chinese rule there) and that English seems to have become the default in science and engineering, it seems an assumption that a growing African economy would retain its French as it's primary 'international' language. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_is_an_official_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_...
- Tiktaalik 12y ago
  Don't forget Montreal. It's the 8th largest city in North America. It has a rich history of bilingualism, but it's essentially French speaking.
  - refurb 12y ago
    My understanding is that 80% of people in Montreal use English as their primary language.
    - Tiktaalik 12y ago
      Your understanding is not consistent at all with the government census stats. French only at home: 56%. English only at home: ~10%. French mainly + other climbs higher. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/2011001/tbl/tbl7-eng.cfm http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-... It also doesn't seem true that Allophones (born not speaking English or French) necessarily are using English the most as their 2nd language. Allophones using French most often at home is increasing over time. http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/companion/lang/provs.cfm#frequently http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/c... Going outside Montreal will yield 90%+ French speakers.
    - my_username_is_ 12y ago
      I would also offer my anecdote to the statistics that Tiktaalik provided based on a few trips to Montreal and French Canada over the last couple years--while it's true that many people speak English as well as French, English seems to be popular because of the large number of English speaking tourists that visit the city (in no small part because of its French culture). Even in the touristy areas you're greated with "Bonjour-hello" to see how you choose to respond. There were a few times I've been grateful to have some background in French, as the person I was talking to didn't know any English (this however, was mostly on the outskirts of Montreal and in smaller towns). Overall, I was surprised at how francophone the city/region as a whole were, as before traveling I had anticipated it being equally French and English.
    - bodyfour 12y ago
VeejayRampay 12y ago
Because we're dying as a world power. It's the cycle of history. We're slowing riding the wave of our past glory toward oblivion. Most of the countries in Africa who used to speak French are now switching to other languages like Swahili, Lingala or Wolof, the Belgian, the Swiss and the Québécois all speak French and English, it's only a matter of time. You can bring up figures and number of speakers, it won't change the fact that we're not relevant as a linguistic group in the world and unlike the other European powers, we haven't yet made the vital switch to having a strong command of English. It's really depressing.
- dreamweapon 12y ago
  Arguably, it was only after France's inevitable and necessary[1] retreat from the global power sphere that it's "real" source of power -- it's way of living, and vernacular culture -- began to really flourish, and be genuinely appreciated on the global stage. You "lost" Indochina and Algeria, pretty much all of your "possessions" everywhere else. But in return you got Houellebecq, Goddard, the Gainsbourgs, Hardy, Dutronc, Pussycat, etc (and the world finally discovered Brassens). And now we all eat brie and goat cheese. What's not to like? [1] In the sense that the retreats of all colonial powers, including the current crop, are inevitable and necessary.

danso 12y ago

Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their jobs and to me everday, and it's still off. I took French in high school just because most everyone else was taking Spanish...that was not a good attempt at rebelling :). I do love the language though, but liking it has no relation to having the discipline to be fluent in it...having situations where you need to speak it is the key factor, and that's not a frequent situation in the States. Still, I'm almost certain that if I hadn't taken French (or Spanish), I would've never known what the nuance of something like the subjunctive mood, in French or in English, and I like thinking through sentence structure when writing and reading...not sure if that casual academic pleasure offers the same level of brain benefits the OP refers to.

watwut 12y ago
I am neither native French not English speaker who learned both (although I forgot a lot of French ever since). English is much easier in the beginning, but it is very hard to really master it. Prepositions are main culprit, it is basically random system. French is harder in the beginning (conjugations/ le vs la), but gets easier and more systematic afterwards.
AYBABTME 12y ago
I'd say English is simpler than French because it doesn't have as many arbitrary exceptions. To begin, English doesn't give genders to every idea. English has much fewer irregular verbs. Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés? I'm no authority on the subject, but here's what I gathered: during la Renaissance, some aristocrats made a game of overly complexifying the language such that the plebe couldn't understand what they were saying. Or just grabbing ideas that look good (participe passé) from other languages (Italian), then sticking to them (while Italian apparently got rid of this silly construction). Also, the basis for French evolution is how authors use the language. The Académie Française looks at what famous authors have written and then use that to define what's proper French, what's not. While this is not stuff I've researched (only what I've heard from French profs justifying our usage of insane constructs); those are what I believe make for French a worst language to learn than English. My wife studied both French and English as second language and found English to be much easier to learn than French. My personal opinion is biased since I'm a native French speaker, but still nowaday I find French to be much more cumbersome than English.

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flatline 12y ago

It could certainly be worse - there are no declensions.

dreamweapon 12y ago

Well it's dead to you, obviously. My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language is, in numerical terms. Or what will come of that language 500 years from now. What matters is what experiences open up to you, as individual, when you go visit (and live) in those countries, in this life, right. It's the people you meet -- and become friends with, perhaps fall in love and start a family with -- and the literature, the music, and poetry that keeps reading and listening into the dead of night and into your dreams -- that matter. Not the gender/case system, of the fact that can speak some generic version of it in 54 countries. In that sense nearly every (major) language community is infinite, and unique. Maybe the one that's most meaningful for you will be a globally dominant language, like Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic. Or maybe it will something far more "marginal", like Basque or Pashto. But whichever it ends up being: whether that language is "alive" or "dead" to you will be a direct function of the energy and enthusiasm you invest in learning it, and (correspondingly) your love for the people who speak it, and their culture. And not a function of whether you can go to a Barnes and Noble right now and find a shelf with 50 (mostly) mediocre books and interactive learning tools for it.

barry-cotter 12y ago
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt until you put Arabic in the same category as Mandarin or Spanish. Vernacular Arabic is as much a single language as vernacular Germanic. Not at all. Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin. [Incredibly vulgar abuse] Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English.
- contingencies 12y ago
  Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. I agree, this is good advice. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English. Useless in career - not necessarily. Useless in life - definitely untrue.

11001 12y ago

Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

g8oz 12y ago
>>if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish. Only if you want to work for the federal government or in the decidedly non dynamic province of Quebec.
- aroberge 12y ago
  New Brunswick is officially a bilingual province. There are lots of opportunities for bilingual (French/English) speakers in Ontario as well.
- subb 12y ago
  Non dynamic?
  - the_duck 12y ago
    Non dynamic: >From 2000 to 2009, no province had lower so-called “firm entry” than Quebec. In fact, in the manufacturing, retail, transportation and finance sectors, more companies went away than were created. No other province had that level of “destruction” without the customarily accompanying “creative.” http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-quebec-business-is-closed/ http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-quebec-business-...
- SG- 12y ago
  Pretending Quebec is a small province, it also helps a lot to work in Ontario near Ottawa.

sampo 12y ago

> I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. According to this classification, French is actually in the easiest category of foreign languages to learn, for an English speaker: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...

bpyne 12y ago

Interesting change going on in language education. I'm a coordinator for my daughter's elementary school's after school program. I wanted to bring in foreign languages so I started with Spanish because of the large Spanish speaking population (plenty of people to practice with) around our area. I partnered with the foreign language department at a nearby college to get some Spanish education students to teach: they received credit while we received free instruction. The head of the department developed the learning modules with her students. The modules were all cultural - music, food and dining, art, literature, etc. - and emphasized vocabulary and phrases associated with the particular cultural lesson. The department head told me that modern language instruction is no longer about learning rules and exceptions, which is how I was taught French, rather it's about getting kids to use language practically as soon as possible. An interesting side note is that the department head and her students consciously stayed away from the culture of Spain itself and focused on the countries of people in our area - Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, and Columbia. Learning, in general, seems to have changed away from rote learning of rules to "let's get the students doing something practical right away so they get excited about learning". My daughter's music teacher is a fairly recent graduate of Berklee Music College's music education program. When my daughter showed up for her first lesson, she had to pick a song she liked. He had her playing it - albeit crudely - by the end of the hour. She was excited and wanted to play more. When I learned drums I don't think I could play to an actual song for my first year. I had to go through hours of practicing rudiments - basic patterns to develop coordination - before applying them to anything. I think we're learning more about how people learn. I'm hopeful that "older dogs will be learning new tricks" thanks to teaching methods better aligned with how we learn.

aikah 12y ago

I'm french and I agree,the language is bloated and too complicated. English might be difficult for a french native that didnt learn it at young age like me but it's much more simple than french. I wonder though why french is that complicated,in some other countries you have the official language and dialects,but often the core of the official language is tiny,so if one sticks to that core one will write correct sentences.It feels like modern french is the result of trying to shove every french dialects into the core,resulting in the bloat it is today. Canadian french seems less bloated.They often use old french expressions,which is good because,many expressions in modern french from France just dont make sense,or words have their meaning abused. And Canadian french seems more able to extend itself from its core,instead of using english words like french from France do.French from France definetly doesnt "scale". It's just my opinion.

renox 12y ago
> I wonder though why french is that complicated, Mostly simple really: 1) French has a long history so a long time to accumulate warts 2) (nearly) each time, someone tries to remove some of these warts, purists scream loudly. Why politicians listen to purists instead of thinking that reducing French's complexity could help foreign people learning French is the thing I wonder though..
bane 12y ago
Well, having the Académie française doesn't help the language evolve much! Language should change over time, take on loanwords, simplify grammatical structures, etc. When they don't, they tend to get passed by by more dynamic languages. One thing we're definitely learning is that adding lots of loanwords to a language does not mean that the language is becoming the same as the source of the loanwords. It's just becoming a newer version of itself. And eliminating baggage doesn't mean the language is no longer "pure", it's just making room in the language for new ideas.
- jjgreen 12y ago
  Bof, French does change, all of the time, and the Académie française only codifies and regularises these changes 30 years later -- it is irrelevant to the development of the language. What is different is that 'loanwords' are frenchified almost immediately, my favourite example being the regular -er verb 'liker', to like on Facebook, je like, tu likes, il like, nous likons, ...

epaladin 12y ago

Seven years of "learning" French in school. I was more conversant in Japanese after a week. French has two non-exceptions to verb conjugation "rules". Japanese has two exceptions. That was a lot of wasted time and I wish there had been more alternatives offered.

terrn 12y ago

This is such a sad thing to think about. Truthfully almost all languages outside of English, Mandarin, and Spanish will eventually die out. But for me learning a second language has never been about practicality, if it was I already needn't bother knowing anything but English. I've been studying Japanese for 12 years now just for the way I can think about things completely differently, and for the way it sounds. I started with French in school and after I feel more solid in my Japanese I plan to go back to it (this could never happen, Japanese is fantastically difficult). As a language lover it is very disheartening to see the inevitability of the decline in human expression through language.

Omniusaspirer 12y ago
On the flip side, it's important to consider that different languages are arguably the largest barrier to anyone looking to experience another culture. While different languages have the novelty factor it also prevents you from fully being able to engage individuals in conversation and really get to know them. This isn't an issue if you're only encountering two or maybe even 3 languages, but when you truly take a global perspective you're looking at French, English, Mandarin, Swahili, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, German, Portugese, Spanish, and Russian. And that's only the big ones I know off the top of my head! Learning new languages is great and I have no desire to see them completely forgotten, but I think when push comes to shove having one global language is absolutely preferable to the current mess we have.

epsylon 12y ago

That's a pretty poor advice. (I'm French myself.) French is pretty widely used (as a native language, and as a learned language as well) and very relevant in today's economy. But moreover, learn French if you want to! If you find it fun, just do it. If you already speak English, you can already communicate with a huge chunk of the world's population. Any language you learn besides that is bonus! (I am currently learning Norwegian on my own, just for the fun of it. There is little interest for me in doing that besides curiosity and the sheer pleasure of expanding my language skills.)

bodyfour 12y ago

Another thing that is hard in French (at least for me) is listening comprehension. For example, I know many more French words than German ones. Not quite enough to read very much (someday, I hope!) but if I were handed a text in French and German, I'd definitely get more out of the French half. When it comes to hearing the languages it's reversed. In German, I can spot the words I do know in a spoken sentence and hope to work out the rest of the meaning from them. In French, between the liaisons and the low degree of syllable emphasis I probably couldn't even tell you how many words there were, much less what any of them were! (The exception is in language instruction videos where they carefully enunciate each word one-by-one, but nobody speaks French like that in real life) I know that with practice picking apart French sentences would become second-nature, but it's a bit of a barrier.