3 ms·

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 m

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.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> English has much fewer irregular verbs. English has, IIRC, far more irregular verbs than French but fewer conjugations to learn (for both regular and irregular verbs) and I think fewer regular patterns to learn. > Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés? English has those, too. Its superficially simpler because for regular verbs (and some irregular ones that are irregular in other ways), the past participle is the same as the past tense, while in French for regular verbs the participe passé is different from any other conjugation. But that superficial simplicity is, in a sense, one of the traps of English for non-native speakers.

dragonwriter 12y ago

> English has much fewer irregular verbs. English has, IIRC, far more irregular verbs than French but fewer conjugations to learn (for both regular and irregular verbs) and I think fewer regular patterns to learn. > Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés? English has those, too. Its superficially simpler because for regular verbs (and some irregular ones that are irregular in other ways), the past participle is the same as the past tense, while in French for regular verbs the participe passé is different from any other conjugation. But that superficial simplicity is, in a sense, one of the traps of English for non-native speakers.