According to the Ethnologue Report, as of 1999, French was the 11th most common first language in the world. 77 million first language speakers and another 51 million second language speakers. French is the native language of France and it’s overseas territories. Along with the Canadian province of Quebec, the Swiss districts of Vaud not to mention the Central African Republic.
One thing that will help you in learning to speak French is to remember that some words have more than one meaning. The same applies to the English language so it should not be to hard for you to make a comprehension on this. An example of this would be with the French word “apprendre”. Depending on the context it is used will determine what you are really saying to someone.
Apprendre quelque chose a quelqu’un: To teach something to someone.
There are many ways to apologize to someone in French. Determining the way to apologize will depend on who you are apologizing to and the seriousness of the offense. I strongly recommended before engaging in any conversation in French that you have a strong understanding of which form you should use and when. Make sure that you are able to fluently pronounce these words. You never know when you are going to need to apologize to someone.
The French language uses endings to nouns to assign male or female type genders to words. All nouns that end in -ment are masculine nouns and all nouns that end in -tion are feminine nouns.
The three irregular French verbs are “pourvoir, vouloir and devoir”. Pourvoir means: to be able to, Vouloir means: to want and Devoir means: to have to.
When speaking French fluently one must understand and be able to know when to use the three irregular French verbs. The three irregular French verbs have similarities in their conjugations making it why they are most often taught together. It is important to know when to use these irregular verbs in sentence structure.
The accent placed on the French language must be used when speaking the French language. The accents indicate proper pronunciation of a word. There for it is recommend that when learning French that you use audio learning tools. This will give you a clear way to hear how words are pronounced in French so that you can practice imitating the accent.
Another thing when learning French that can prove to be difficult is that the French “H” comes in two forms. In both forms the French “H” is silent but the difference is that in one form the French “H” is a consonant and in the other form the French “H” is a vowel.
Capitalization of days of the weeks, months, languages and first person singular subject pronouns are not capitalized in French. With all of these being capitalized in English it will take some getting use to.
Sentence structure for the French verb “manquer: to miss” is opposite of normal sentence structure. The improper sentence structure for this would be ” je te manque: I miss you”. Instead you would use the opposite structure for this one. The proper sentence structure for this one would be ” tu me manques: you are missing to me”.
Some words can mean the same thing in either language with just a little spelling difference. But mistakes are made when you see a word and think that it means the same things as it’s English looking counterpart. There are a lot of words in French that look like English words but that means something totally different. When learning French, you need to pay close attention to this.
Coin in French does not refer to money like it does in English. Coin in French refers to a corner or an area. Bras in French refers to an arm while in English it is just plural to bra. Another one of the many words is the word Blesser which refers to wound, injure or offend even though it looks close to the English word of bless.
It takes patience when learning a different language. To better help you in learning use multiple forms of language tools such as books , audio tools and even look around for some free online language quizzes. All of these combined will help you to advance in your learning. The above tips should help you to avoid mistakes that are made by people who speak French as a second language.
