French is Easy

I grew up in Lancashire for ten years, then in Western Australia for twelve years, then the Eastern States. I was thirty-two years old when first I went to France. Couldn’t understand a word. And I was working there, getting paid Big Franks.

At age 75 I am listening to news podcasts from SBS Sydney (not the original Sydney in Nova Scotia, but the young upstart in New South Wales) and am learning a lot about learning a foreign language.

This morning I heard a podcast in which the person being interviewed used a phrase (in French) which included several multi-syllabic words, amongst them “pertinent”. Which is in English “pertinent”, and I forget the rest but pick one or two from “Allowance, Apostrophe, Aviation, Bachelor, Connoisseur, Expatriate, Gastronomy, Literature, Magnificent, Metabolism, Optimism, Recipient, Restaurant, Solicitor, Television”.

I was struck by the idea that for English people learning French, and for French people learning English, the big words are not the problem. The big words in English arrived during one of the two Norman Invasions (1066, and 1200-1250) and are therefore common to both languages.

This is the basis for the party-trick “I can teach you three hundred words in French [or Spanish] in ten seconds, along with the gender – masculine or feminine – and a guarantee that you will not forget a single one of them” (1)

The truth is that it in either language it is the small words, like the common verb “to be”, which are difficult. The English verb “to be” and its conjugations survived the Normans and arrives from the Anglo-Saxon pre-1066; it is, therefore, foreign to the French. As is “ętre” to the English.

Think of “Absolutamente”, “Naturalamente”, “Perfectamente”. See what I mean?

Think of the definite and indefinite articles, the eight or so pronouns.

French is Easy is as long as you stick to the big, complicated words.

(1) Every word in English that ends in “tion” is the same in French [Spanish] and is feminine; check it out sometime with a native speaker of French.

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