I'm thinking about entering a language school to learn French. Right now the only words I know in French are oui and merde Is French an easy language? Would 10 months be enough for me to learn it?
It depends if you're a fast learner or not. Some people 'grasp' languages easily, whilst others take a little longer. I've learnt Dutch and now I'm trying to learn Turkish. I don't think you'll have a problem learning the words and such, it's more a case of the grammar and the different ways they construct a sentence in comparisent to English. Good luck, just do your best - Learning new languages is fun. well I think it is.
People told me to learn Italian, since it is very similar to Spanish. Portuguese is also very similar, but you know... French is the language of love...
More like French is the language of blocked up noses. I would much rather learn Spanish, or Italian than French. But whatever floats your boat.
I took French for 3 years, and couldn't speak or understand anything. So then I took Spanish for a year, and couldn't speak anything in that language either. So then I realized languages are not my thing, and I stopped trying to learn languages. I speak enough programming languages that it's all good. heh
I think it also depends on your goals. I did saturday morning lessons for 6 months before cycling round the country. Every saturday morning found me tired and hungover and barely able to comprehend a thing. Still when I got there I had fab-o conversations like "today we are doing this - in two weeks" or "we need to fix this bike, please leave your bike shop" and they did! We just needed to get by and be understood so everything in the present tense worked just fine. We couldn't, however, have meaningful discussions on world politics or hold down a job. As for Spanish. We got stopped by a cop for a minor traffic infringement half way up the pyrenees (slightly slower progress than the lads are making today) and discovered that if you lisp your french (bad as that was) it became spanish! So, since you know spanish you'll probably pick up french really quickly. Sarah
Well if you think that's bad, I took French for roughly 9 years and I honestly cannot say anything except J'mappelle Carmella. Even then I cant spell it properly. I also took spanish but I was a fool in school and only wanted to gossip and have fun so I learnt no spanish either. Now i'm out of school I love and thrive off learning. wierd how things turn out. learn spanish - it's so sexy! u can woo girls into bed by just saying yo im fryman. nintendo i think this would be good for you too mate. Less time plucking hairs and cutting nails, more time learning sexy languages. write that down.
If you already know spanish, french will probably not be to difficult to learn. Many of the words have similar roots and the grammer is not to different.
They say that about Dutch and German. but ill be buggered if I can understand a thing in German. It's like you are threatening to kill someone when you just say hello. aggressive languageeeeeeeee
It just depends what part of Germany Mella. I in German is Ich... but it can be pronounced sharply "ICK" or softly "Ish." Both are correct as far as German goes... it just depends on the dialect you speak.
I agree with Mella, whnever I hear to people talking in German I always turn my head to see what's going on, because it always sounds as if they were going to slam each other in the head with a chair
You speak spanish natively do you not fryman? It's not that difficult. German is a rough language, french is more of a smooth language like spanish. Both are latin languages that share a lot in common. French should not be that difficult to pick up, especially since you are English now, you can get a lot of exposure to french just by going there. Americans are terrible at learning other languages, but three things contribute to that: 1) everybody speaks english when we travel 2) english has a much different grammatical structure than spanish or french, our two most likely languages to learn. 3) most people can't get to an environment saturated in the language. The best we can do is learn restaurant spanish. there isn't even a lot of foreign language tv and what we do have is pretty bad.
I can speak french (just about), but thats only by living in a french speaking country..a month somewhere and you will learn more than years of lessons. Normally, I wouldnt recommend something like this, but this guy is quite good. http://www.michelthomas.com/ - I listened to the first hour of spanish and havent forgotten it yet.
Sad to say I can not understand a word of French. If you can read Spanish you can read any romance language. French idioms and Spanish idioms are the same. Shannon
If you are thinking of learning French to speak to the French while in France.... forget it. DW and my experiences have been just the otherwise. She has taught French in high school, speaks well, has all the proper intonations (to my hear anyway) but the French turn a deaf ear. We communicate better using English, body language, hand gesture, and $$$.
Speaking French is one thing. Being able to understand it when you hear it is quite another. I've lived in Quebec for 7 years, and taken plenty of French classes. I can read some, speak some, but when someone comes up to me in the street and starts talking in a thick Montreal drawl at a mile a minute, I just have to shrug and say Je ne comprende pas.
Our experience was so different. Maybe it helps to be 2 23yo girls on bikes but the old couple in the farm house who let us camp in their yard and use their loo because it was raining so hard the campground was flooded before we even got there. The man pulled out a musty old atlas and couldn't believe we'd crossed 4 pages of his atlas to arrive at his farmhouse. the slightly drunk young guys in a campground one night trying to understand why we were riding "mens" bikes the slightly older young couple camping with their small children who had lain in their tent laughing at our attempts to converse with the slightly drunk young guys. They then spent some time teaching us the right words for the things we'd stumbled over the night before. the guys in the shops who suffered through our "comment dis" questions the young doctor who picked us up hitchhiking who was embarrassed to use his flawed english (which was excellent) so would rather suffer through our pitiful french the kids who just wanted to trade swear words and we'd chat in mangled anglo-french as we both made-do with what parts of the others language we had in common. Once you're out of Paris and the tourist traps the people are as lovely as anywhere else in the world you might venture and, I believe, will be more than appreciative of the effort you make. Sarah
Which would you pick? I'm starting to feel like I should learn cantonese as that is a major language in my city. It's a bit daunting though primarily because it's tonal and english speakers aren't used to that.