How hard is it to learn French?
French has a reputation for being hard, and the reputation is almost always about pronunciation. Here is what English gives you for free, what is actually hard, and how to begin.
The short answer
French is easier to read than to follow when someone talks. English gives you a great deal of the vocabulary. The hard part is that French does not sound the way it looks: many letters are silent, and several sounds have to be trained.
The U.S. Department of State, whose language school is widely known as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), puts French in Category I, its group of languages close to English. So the language is within reach. Expect pronunciation and spelling to take longer than they would in Spanish, and expect the verbs to need work.
What English gives you for free
English is a Germanic language and French comes from Latin. But after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, French was the language of the court and the law for centuries, and English took in thousands of French words.
- Words spelled the same. Table, fruit, question, animal, orange, nation, possible and important mean the same in both languages. The pronunciation differs, the spelling does not.
- Words one step away. Gouvernement (government), couleur (color), musique (music), famille (family) and université (university).
- A trick with the circumflex. The accent in forêt, hôpital and île often marks an s that French dropped and English kept: forest, hospital, isle.
Basic word order is subject, verb, object, as in English. Marie mange une pomme is Marie eats an apple, word for word.
What is actually hard
The difficulty in French is the distance between writing and sound, and after that the verbs.
- Letters you do not hear. Consonants at the end of a word are often silent: petit, beaucoup, trop. Il parle (he talks) and ils parlent (they talk) sound the same. So do vert (green), verre (glass), vers (toward) and ver (worm).
- New sounds. The u in tu (you), the r in rouge (red) and the nasal vowels do not exist in English. Un bon vin blanc (a good white wine) contains four different nasal vowels.
- Irregular verbs. The most common verbs are the most irregular. Je suis, tu es, il est, nous sommes, vous êtes and ils sont are all forms of être (to be).
- Gender. Every noun is masculine or feminine, and English gives you no feel for it: le soleil (the sun), la lune (the moon). Articles and adjectives change to match.
Numbers take getting used to. In France, 70 is soixante-dix (sixty-ten) and 80 is quatre-vingts (four twenties). False friends are common because the languages share so many words: librairie is a bookstore, not a library, and attendre means to wait. Expect to read French well before you can follow a conversation.
How long it takes and how many people use it
The State Department trains U.S. government staff in about 60 languages and publishes how long each usually takes. French is listed at 30 weeks. Category I as a whole runs 24 to 30 weeks, or 552 to 690 class hours, so French sits at the long end with 690. That is the time usually expected to reach level 3 in speaking and listening on the government’s ILR scale, with 23 hours a week in class and 17 hours of self-study. A school course moves far more slowly, but the comparison between languages is still useful.
Ethnologue’s 2026 list counts 333.5 million people who use French as a first or second language, which makes it the sixth largest language in the world.
How to start
- Listen and read at the same time. Because writing and sound drift apart, you need to hear every new word. Play the audio for your textbook while you follow the text.
- Learn nouns with their article. Put une table and un livre on your word list, not just table and livre, and you get the gender along with the word.
- Take the four big verbs first. Être (to be), avoir (to have), aller (to go) and faire (to do) turn up in almost every sentence. Learn them in the present tense.
How you study matters more than which language you picked. Read more in The basics of learning a language.
Practice French vocabulary with Learn It
Learn It is a free iPhone and iPad app with no ads that quizzes you on vocabulary. You type in your word list and practice with Spelling, Multiple choice or Flashcards. Spelling makes you write the whole word correctly, which is exactly the hard part in French, and after each round you can practice just the ones you missed.
There are also ready-made quizzes, such as Everyday verbs in French, Family in French and Tens, 100 and 1000 in French. All of them are listed under French.
