I’ve spoken French fluently for several years, and recently I asked myself what the hardest thing about learning it was for me. I also asked 2 of my American friends who learned the language, as well as 3 of my current French roommates, and compiled that information here.
Overall, the hardest thing about learning French is oral comprehension (listening). This is due to variations in vernacular, the urgency of listening, our brains’ resistance to the spoken word, and silent letters. Moreover, a lack of oral comprehension completely disables you in everyday life, whereas you can overcome other weaknesses.
Let’s look closer at this, and how “the hardest thing” evolves during the learning process.
Table of Contents
Why is oral comprehension (listening) so hard?
While pronunciation, verb conjugations, and managing gendered nouns and their agreements are tough, nothing demands quite as much attention and has as strong an impact on your ability to communicate as oral comprehension.
Listening is tough because you constantly have to adapt to the speaker. He or she may have a slight accent, a deep or high voice, personal speaking patterns, or just speak softly.
In addition, it simply takes longer for the brain to develop neural pathways from scratch to understand a new language. If I translate for you the words of a written sentence in French, you will be able to identify them because it’s visual. Words are made of letters you know as an English speaker, so it’s just a question of memorizing the meaning. With listening, it’s the identification part that’s tough. Memorization serves no purpose if you can’t identify what you’re hearing. The brain needs time to identify a new language well.
Another reason is that there is a sense of urgency to listening. If you did not understand, you cannot go back on the page of life to hear it over. You have to stop the person speaking and ask them to repeat, which is sometimes uncomfortable.
An additional reason about French itself is the presence of silent letters. Often times, two different words or two different conjugations (see below for explanation) will sound exactly alike. For example, let’s look at “he” and “they,” as well as their conjugations of “to work,” which is “travailler” in French.
| Il (he) | travaille |
| Ils (they) | travaillent |
Beginners often want to pronounce the “-ent” ending, but this is not correct. in the audio you’ll note I emphasize the end of the plural. This is by convention in learning, but you will rarely hear it spoken.
But let’s be honest and put things in perspective. Even in English it can be difficult to understand people from various linguistic backgrounds. For example, a yankee in Mobile, Alabama might struggle to understand the vernacular. Multiply that feeling by 2 with every person you speak to, and you get an idea for what it’s like.
We can compare the struggle with oral comprehension to wearing a blindfold and walking around an unfamiliar house. You can feel things and have an idea of what they are, but you can’t be certain. With listening, you hear things, but you can’t always be sure what it was.
It depends on your mother tongue
Of course, the first thing you have to consider is the learner’s first language. A Chinese student may immediately say that the most difficult part of learning French is the latin alphabet, whereas a Spanish person might only complain about unpronounced vowels.
In this article, I’m assuming that the reader is either an English native or speaks English fluently, mostly because he/she has made it this far. Even if you speak English as a second language, these points will still apply. If you already speak a romance language then you may want to skip the rest — it’s not for you.
Hardest for Beginners: Verb Conjugations
Beginners have a hard time with verb conjugations. If you don’t already know, verb conjugations are the splitting of an infinitive “to” verb (to go, to be, to climb) into it’s form for each subject. In English, it looks like this for the verb “to be”:
| Subject | Conjugation of “to be” |
| I | am |
| You | are |
| He/She | is |
| They | are |
My friends and I think that newbies struggle with this because, when you first start learning, you expect to speak in full sentences. You expect basic sentences, but sentences nonetheless. And that’s especially true for those learning their first non-native language.
The realization that you can’t speak sentences immediately usually happens when we talk about verb conjugations. Most students don’t know how to approach learning conjugations, so they commit themselves to writing them over and over again. They do eventually learn, but it takes a long time and can be challenging, especially when you’re learning grammar at the same time.
There is a much easier way to learn conjugations, but that’s for a different article.
Hardest for Intermediate Learners: Speaking
The hardest thing about learning French for intermediate level students is speaking. Most resources classify intermediate learners as those who gain some autonomy in their communication, some independence.
Intermediate learners are usually at the stage where they begin to speak in complete sentences. They can communicate ideas on paper, know most of their basic conjugations, and understand simple spoken sentences.
But speaking is a bully. It’s very hard to explain the feeling of speaking another language. You feel almost like an intruder at first — as if you are just mumbling alien sounds that need to be translated by someone after. You simply don’t have an intellectual relationship to what you say.
It takes time, repetition, and a solid study strategy before you start to speak fluidly. I advocate for you doing it in one year.
Hardest for Advanced Learners: the Subjunctive and Oral Comprehension
The hardest things about learning French for advanced learners are the subjunctive and oral comprehension. The subjunctive is a verbal mood in French that expresses uncertainty, emotion, necessity, and doubt — in a word, it’s used when the subject expresses an attitude.
The tricky thing about the subjunctive is that it has its own conjugations. Advanced learners need to navigate learning these new conjugations, but more importantly, they need to navigate employing them in speech.
Imagine you want to say, “I need to drink water” (“il faut que je boive de l’eau”). Because “need” is a verb of necessity, you must conjugate “drink” in the subjunctive (N/A in English, but it will serve as an example). In French, the difference between the normal verb “bois” vs the subjective verb “boive” is subtle, but important.
As an advanced learner, you’re probably comfortable speaking in short sentences and conversing well. But the subjunctive is a curve ball. You need to start actively changing your words as you speak.
It may seem like the subjunctive exists by convention and not by necessity–there is debate around this topic. In English, it would be like saying “May God saves the queen” instead of “May God save the queen.” It just doesn’t feel natural, and it confuses the listener.
In addition, advanced learners also start coming into contact with spoken French more often, which is difficult for all the reasons mentioned above.
Hardest Thing about French Grammar: Gendered Nouns
The hardest part about French grammar is managing gendered nouns and their agreements. Nouns in French are either feminine or masculine, which you can identify by the article preceding them:
| English article | Masculine French Article | Feminine French Article |
| The | le | la |
| A | un | une |
This is truly the most painstaking thing about French grammar, and it’s something I still get wrong every day, even though I live and work in the language.
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about gendered nouns is that they serve very little purpose. If the French Academy, or L’Académie Française removed genders entirely from the language, it would be very hard to argue that any meaning is lost. Gendered nouns exist almost exclusively by convention, and it’s tough to remember them.
Some might argue that without genders, the listener would get confused by the use of adjectives in long sentences. This is due to the necessity of agreement between adjectives and the nouns they modify.
For example, the adjective “beau” means “good looking” or “handsome” in its masculine form. If you use the same word for a feminine noun, you must change it to “belle.” The equivalent in English would be “beautiful,” but this does not translate well. Beautiful and handsome are two different words, whereas beau and belle are different forms of the same word.
Even if there arises some confusion around the relationship of several adjectives in a sentence, a reader or listener can usually deduce these relationships intuitively. After all, that’s what we do in English!
Remembering the gender for each noun is a truly tedious task. Because it carries so little value for communication, it’s hard to motivate yourself to learn them. That’s why I would say gendered nouns are the hardest thing about French grammar.
Hardest Thing about Communication: Oral Comprehension
We’ve already discussed this pretty thoroughly above, but I think it’s important to classify oral comprehension as the hardest thing about communication in French. From beginning till end, oral comprehension will remain the most challenging part about exchanging with others.
Some people claim to be better at listening than speaking, but I would attribute that to an imbalance of practice. Of course, if you only practice listening, then your ear will surpass your mouth. But you will also be far behind the person who works on both of them.
The point is that if you practice all things evenly, listening usually comes out as the most challenging. It just is the longest by nature. You shouldn’t worry about this much if you’re in an earlier stage. If you practice with the balanced strategy we recommend at The French Objective, this will be part of your learning timetable.
Hardest Thing about the Process: Knowing What and How to Learn
The hardest thing about the learning process is knowing what to learn, and knowing how to learn it. Most people go to a class for their level, buy books for their level, or try to immerse themselves in radio and movies. And they waste an enormous amount of time.
While all of the above strategies are OK, there’s a much better way. You should dedicate an equal amount of time to listening, speaking, reading, and writing. When you do this, you’ll need to make sure you shuffle vocab, grammar, and conjugations around of the course of several days so your mind has time to encode it. This will help you learn is an immersive, natural way. It’s what we advocate for at The French Objective.