Language Profile French
French (français) is today spoken around the world by 72 to 130 million people as a native language, and by about 190 to 600 million people as a second or third language, with significant speakers in 54 countries. It is an official language in 29 countries.
Most native speakers of the language live in France or the French territories, where the language originated. The rest live in Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, parts of Africa, and spread around the world. There are many dialects of the French language depending on the country where it hails from, and many people find that they vary quite a lot from place to place. Although there are many French regional accents, only one version of the language is normally chosen as a model for foreign learners, which has no commonly used special name, but has been termed français neutre (neutral French). French is a descendant of the Latin language of the Roman Empire, as are languages such as Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Catalan and Romanian. Its development was also influenced by the native Celtic languages of Roman Gaul and by the Germanic language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders.
Learning French is easy because:
French is written in roman script, and so it is an easier script to learn in general for most people. As it is a Romance language it has many similarities to a number of other European languages, both with grammar and vocabulary. There are many ‘loan words’ from French that make it easier to understand and be understood. Words like cigarette, coup, entrepreneur are all French in origin, and are regularly used in English. French sentence structure is quite straightforward, with the regular construction of subject- verb- object. As this is a common structure for many languages it is easier to remember.
Learning French is challenging because:
French pronunciation is the most difficult aspect of learning French for many students, particularly English speakers. It takes a lot of practice to pronounce French correctly, but if you really want to speak French, good pronunciation is essential. French has informal and formal ways of saying things. This is because there is more than one meaning to "you" in French (as well as in many other languages.) The informal you is used when talking to close friends, relatives, animals or children. The formal you is used when talking to someone you just met, do not know well, or someone for whom you would like to show respect (a professor, for example.) There is also a plural you, used when speaking to more than one person. There seem to be more verb tenses in French than many other languages, and some are used in a very limited fashion, such as the past historic, used mainly for literary texts. French uses subjunctives and conditionals, and has many irregular forms to remember.
French with Cactus:
Cactus provides French language training as 1:1 programs, closed groups for in-house company training, full-immersion courses, online courses, self-study, and on public evening courses.