<p>I always wanted to take French, and I was planning on taking French in high school, but my mom was like 'no, you should take Spanish because it's more useful and French is really hard'..
So I just ended up taking Spanish. I guess I agree that Spanish is more useful, but I just reallyreallyreallyreally want to learn French for some reason.</p>
<p>So that being said, how hard can French be? Spanish was pretty easy for me in high school, I got all A's and at the end of the year I was taking Spanish 4 and I kind of slacked off, but I still managed to get an A...
I guess one thing that really worries me is pronunciation. I just CANNOT say any french word that has 'r' in it. I kind of struggled with 'rr' in Spanish, too, but my teacher didn't really care about pronunciation.</p>
<p>I know absolutely nothing about French, so is there like a French class for beginners in college? I guess I do want to take French, but I don't want to stress over tests and all that, I just want to keep it as a hobby thing. :p</p>
<p>French is slightly harder than Spanish, mostly because phonetics don’t help with spelling or pronunciation at all in French. But it is a beautiful language, and grammar is similar to Spanish. You can take French 101 in college.</p>
<p>And with the ‘r’ thing, that will come with time. It took me about three months. And the ‘r’ is not always pronounced the way you’re thinking either.</p>
<p>I’ve studied French since 8th grade. I, unlike you, decided to take it even though everyone else was telling me to take Spanish. I love French but sometimes I wish I took Spanish because it would be so much more useful for me.</p>
<p>I just studied abroad in France over the summer with a group from my school and I realized that French is quite hard for people. It came to me fairly naturally but the pronunciation is extremely difficult for a lot of people. I think that if you study it though, and realize why things are pronounced the way they are, it will come much more naturally.</p>
<p>I took French in high school, even though my parents told me to take Spanish because it was more useful. I wish I had taken Spanish in high school because it would have been way more useful (especially for the career I ended up pursuing). I took a couple classes in college, and even though I only went up to French 3 in high school, I would still think of how to say everything in French and then have to translate it into Spanish. That was really the only problem I encountered though.</p>
<p>If you want to learn the language, college is a great time to do it. They will have beginning language classes in college, and French isn’t particularly difficult in the beginning, especially since it is similar to Spanish. At my school, it was a bigger time commitment than other classes, just because they want you to have exposure every day so the classes are 5 days a week for an 1-1.5 hours. The work outside of the class wasn’t particularly difficult though.</p>
<p>French is definitely not that hard (although I’m learning Arabic right now so that might be what I’m comparing it too), especially if you’re good with languages in general - if you had an easy time learning Spanish, French won’t be hard, plus knowing Spanish will really help you with French. As for the r’s, it took me years to get the hang of it and I still have trouble (like I can do it when I’m speaking French in sentences but not if I just say a word) but people will still be able to understand you as long as your pronunciation is good in other areas.</p>
<p>I’m a huge language enthusiast and from my experience, whether a language is hard really depends on the person. I took French for a year in middle school, I thought it was okay but that was just the basic beginning class. If you want to learn it, I highly encourage you to go for it. Do not pay attention to whether it’s hard or not. Just learn it. </p>
<p>I’m studying Finnish right now and if you don’t know, it’s considered one of the hardest languages to learn by a lot of people. It makes French looks like a piece of cake. But I don’t find Finnish hard at all. I mean, some of the rules are bizarre but when it comes down to it. I really really enjoy learning it so I find it fun, not hard.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you have a lot of motivation to learn a language, it’ll come to you a lot easier than it will for other people who don’t like learning that language. You seem to really want to learn French, so seriously, DO IT.</p>
<p>^Completely irrelevant considering that the brain picks up anything way easier during the first 10 years of life, especially if it is being taught by someone meaningful like your parents. Truth is, you might have a hard time learning a new language in college because your brain is not that flexible anymore. I’m only in HS, but I know German, English, Latin, French and Spanish and the latter two were for sure the hardest of the five because I started them later although they are quite closely related to Latin.</p>
<p>Go for it, but expect a major workload if you actually want to speak it. Conversation classes are the best way to go after you have learned the basics because let’s be honest, writing is not going to help you much if you talk to french people. </p>
<p>Btw, the “r” thing must be embedded in american DNA. I don’t have it as a German, but the other 4 people in my class are all Americans and they have problems with it too. Must be the mouth muscles formation after learning English as your mother tongue. ;)</p>
<p>thanks tobessebor. the only thing is English is not my native language, haha. My first language is Korean, and I’ve been speaking English for about four years now I think.</p>
<p>I think I’m gonna try to take French in spring since the classes that I’m taking are all required courses
Thanks again!</p>
<p>It’s always awkward reading things about learning French when I’m sitting in my linguistics lab in France…</p>
<p>For a native/near native speaker of English who speaks no languages that are more closely related to one than the other, French and Spanish are about equally difficult. The state department, which expects mostly monolingual English speakers, gives its employees equal amounts of time to study them. Longer amounts of time are given for languages like Chinese that are more difficult for monolingual English speakers - everyone in the lab with me right now is a native Mandarin speaker and though I’ve taken the language for 2 years I have no idea what they’re saying until they speak in French.</p>
<p>French has a few more cognates with English than Spanish (Wooh Norman invasion of 1066!), so lexically it should be slighty easier. Grammatically and phonologically, they present about the same level of difficulty for native/near-native English speakers. A person living in America will likely have many more opportunities to be exposed to and to practice Spanish than French.</p>
<p>GMTplus7’s comments of course entirely ignore the fact that children in the Francophone world are learning their native language, as tobessebor pointed out. But tobessebor vastly overestimates the age range during which a person can learn a first language. Looking at the learning of a new language in even 3 year olds, you will see patterns of errors that start look more like those a second language learner would make than like those that a baby would make in its first language. And this has nothing to do with who teaches you the language. I’m also not sure if tobessebor meant to imply this or not, but ability to learn a language has nothing to do with DNA. (I’m assuming tobessebor is joking, right?) Children do get primed for their language even in the womb, to be sure, but this is a very broad sort of priming. Basically they are more prepared to hear their own syllable structure. So Japanese newborns, like, less than a day old, respond to Japanese and Italian equally as both of these languages go pretty much consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel. They are less interested in English, which more frequently puts consonants together in clumps. This is of course very easily erased - children adopted internationally in the first few months of life have no trouble with what becomes their native tongue. Tobessebor also overestimates how long it takes children to develop prejudices for their native sounds. Even before babies can speak and have been using their muscles prejudicially for the sounds in their own language rather than others, they learn to hear contrasts that are important for their mother tongue. Eg, American and Thai (maybe?, I sort of forgot this study) babies are, at birth, both good at hearing “ng” sounds at the beginning of words. By the age of a year, American babies are already awful at it. American and Japanese babies are, at birth, equally bad at distinguishing “r” and “l.” A year later, American babies are excellent at it and Japanese babies are actually worse than they started off. </p>
<p>Millions and millions of middle school n high school kids in America have taken French and have lived. </p>
<p>It’s not rocket science…</p>
<p>Spanish is a more practical language to have in U.S. and worldwide (despite what the French would like to believe). But once u pick up one Romance language, learning another Romance language is a piece of cake. Both of my kids learned Spanish in middle school n are now moving on to learning French. They are not native Spanish nor French speakers either.</p>
<p>Don’t obsess about pronunciation and u will be fine.</p>
<p>^GMTplus7, I don’t think that’s easily said. Spanish is more practical if you are going to stay on this side of the Atlantic, yes, but outside of the Americas and the Iberian peninsula, you encounter few Spanish speakers. French will get you around in France, Belgium, and Switzerland to be sure, but also nearly half of Africa, parts of the Caribbean, some of the Middle East, and to a certain extent it’s still useful in parts of Southeast Asia.</p>
<p>It’s also worth remembering that English far outranks both of these languages and is the currently the worldwide lingua franca. For a fluent speaker of English, practicality is not an imperative for a second language.</p>
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/New-Map-Francophone_World.PNG[/url]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/New-Map-Francophone_World.PNG%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
![http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Map-Hispanophone_World.png[/url]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Map-Hispanophone_World.png%5B/url%5D){kind=link}
