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@ Peter “It also annoys me when (some) authors use French words when writing in English, when there is a perfectly valid English word for what they are trying to say.”
Ahah it’s the same in French with English words, which sound “cooler” or “younger”. I don’t like it either, although I love English.
@ Milanmaras
I watched the video you made in French and I must say that it’s quite good. Your pronunciation is very good, very clear, and it’s something important for French speakers.
In France we like to say that French is the most difficult language on earth, that we wouldn’t like to learn it as a foreign language, etc… Well, I’ve also seen many Brazilians say the same of Portuguese and I’m sure they’re not the only ones.
Anyway, even if French people (not everyone of course!) are often laughing at foreigners’ accent/pronunciation, we then admit it’s not easy at all.
French is the nightmare of French themselves. We all remember French classes we had at school, and the “dictées”. We’re also taught to speak well. That’s why, maybe, we don’t forgive mistakes easily at first. That’s also why we’re shy when it comes to speaking in a foreign language.
However, as soon as we know a foreigner better, we’re much more patient with them and amazed by the efforts they make to speak in French.
So as long as you’re not lecturing in an ampitheatre full of nasty French youngsters, don’t worry. 
It’s just that we love making fun of everything.
And in general the “English accent” is the one we like the most.
@ Edwin
I’d like to see more threads in French too!
Allez il faut poster en français ! ^^
Si vous commencez d’avantage de “fils” en français, je vais participer.
For me the hardest part of French, no doubt about it, has been the listening-comprehension part, mainly when it comes to hear native french people speaking. Sometimes they speak, pronounce, and use grammatical structures in a really really different way from what is taught in the books and courses which can result really confusing or frustrating; and sometimes the speed they talk in can result incredibly fast. I know that happens in every language but I find the above situations specially marked in the French language.
When I listen to the news and TV documentaries I have no much problem, I think because hosts and narrators try to speak with a not so fast speach and trying to stick the more possible to the “standard” language (I mean the one is taught in the books), the same when speaking with a person who have learned French as a foreign language, not much problem there, I suppose because he/she sticks to what he/she has learned in books, standard pronuntiation, grammar etc. so we both, so to say “are speaking the same language”.
At the end of the day I think it all comes to pratice, practice and more practice.
I’m not trying to generalize, this is just my personal experience.
Greetings.
Lu,
“fils” n’est pas très approprié comme mot et ne veux même rien dire pour nous dans ce contexte, du moins pour moi, les autres confirmeront … c’est la traduction de “thread” en anglais et sur le forum, quand on ouvre un sujet, on parle généralement de ‘post’ parfois de ‘topic’ … voire de ‘message’ sauf votre respect Steve 
bien sûr …
++
French is harder than English.
German is harder than French.
Russian is harder than German.
Chinese is harder than Russian.
Just my personal opinion.
Yes - that sounds about spot on to me, Hape!
@ JayB and Hape. All depends upon perspective. I have no interest in Chinese script whatsoever…Only to communicate…through listening and speaking. Having said that…and having studied Russian for years, and Chinese not as long, I consider Chinese much easier to use and understand in terms of grammar. Speaking and understanding spoken Chinese is a bit of a challenge compared to Russian, but not much, considering the endless combinations of grammatical variations, i.e. verb aspect, verbs of motion, case endings. etc., etc., etc., etc. etc…
If I were to add Chinese script to the equation, I would then agree with your statements.
@milanmaras “I have no idea how people say they can learn French in 200 hours. Nonsense and rubbish - unless I’m retarded I can’t believe it.”
I guess it’s just kinda “mental blockage”. I have no problems with french BUT I do have problems (a lot of them) with portuguese… for God’s sake I am a native spanish speaker!!! pretty stupid, don’t you think?
“The issue with French, I have a fear that the listener will laugh at me for sounding like a retard or uneducated dim-wit.”
yep, I was right xD
@Timroof
Yes, I guess it does depend a lot on the individual learner and his/her perspective.
However for me personally it’s like this: I am able to imagine myself learning Russian - I can actually see myself mastering its complexities. But when I tried learning some Chinese a few months ago, I just crashed and burned! I quickly realized that it would take me many years to learn enough of the script to read. At the same time, I realized that I would never master the tones - not in an entire lifetime!
Grammar is the easy point with Chinese, of course. But on the other hand, I understand that the idioms are extremely rich and complex.
So all in all, I’m pretty sure Russian would actually be easier for ME than Chinese!
@JayB
Yea, agreed. I think the difficulty of reaching a reading level in Chinese that would enable me to even begin learning the spoken language using transcripts would be a mammoth task in itself. As complex/intricate as Russian can be sometimes, at least it’s all there on the page in a form that’s not too hard to digest. Chinese would almost seem like learning two langauges…
Then again all that declination in Russian : / At least once I knew a Chinese word, I know it, and it’s not morphing around when I try to say it in a sentence…
@hape - Although it might take longer to learn to write or speak German without (many) mistakes, I suspect it takes less time and familiarity with the language to be able to understand German movies (and real life German ) than it does with French. Also, I think German is easier to pronounce.
@Friedemann DE - Chinese is much harder than any of the other languages because there are “Large number of homophones or near homophones” in this language.
That’s true. That’s why I am struggling with listening to real conversations or information without Chinese subtitles.
I certainly find Chinese more time-consuming and difficult than French, but oddly enough, I find Spanish quite a bit more difficult than French. I seem to be in a minority on that latter point…
For me the #1 difficulty is when words are smooshed together and I have to make sense of them. So French listening comprehension seems insurmountable to me, since I first heard “real French” spoken when I was 19. If I watch French news or documentaries, I feel okay, but then I can’t understand a simple conversation overheard on the street or a sitcom.
Also, in high school I hated the literary tenses. We spent so much time studying it, like a year or more, and I found it so boring at that age.
With Japanese comprehension, I had such a hard time understanding some men, like my landlord. I could not understand anything this man said to me. In contrast, there was never a Japanese character that was unreadable because it was illegible. I couldn’t read some forms of calligraphy, having never studied it. But if I had studied calligraphy, I would have been able to read. No amount of studying would have allowed me to understand my landlord. Learning thousands of characters is a matter of study. But making sense of my landlord’s giant blob of words that sounded nothing like NHK, or my co-workers or even someone like Hama-chan, was something no amount of studying was helping me to do.
The second most difficult thing to me is social propriety. Like in Japanese, using situational business Japanese in a semi-formal, semi-social situation, and having people go umm…WTF? When I was in Europe I sometimes came across business materials in English that were grammatically correct but grossly inappropriate in a business situation. I was thinking, uh, I think you should have had a native speaker look this over first. . .
Grammar doesn’t bother me because it’s a matter of putting in the time to learn and study. If I’m bad at the grammar I have a hope of getting better if I study. Learning social propriety is a matter of embarrassing oneself until someone finally tells you. But deciphering a giant blob of smooshed words is what causes me to despair in language learning and the worst offender that I’ve personally studied is French.
@Peter: “…Although it might take longer to learn to write or speak German without (many) mistakes, I suspect it takes less time and familiarity with the language to be able to understand German movies (and real life German ) than it does with French. Also, I think German is easier to pronounce.”
Now that I come to think about it, I reckon you may well be absolutely right about this.
In fact, it is possibly true of the Romance languages in general (Portuguese at the very least.)
Well, as to understanding every single person who is a native speaker of your target language, I think, that’s true mastery - not even reached by many natives themselves… 
I remember when I went to the US for the first time. I considered myself fairly fluent in English at that time, given that I talked English 6 weeks in a row in an international setting before, hardly ever struggling with it, additionally having travelled to Britain a couple of times before and always having been able to make myself understood.
Well, when I first went to a supermarket and a bar in Virginia, I didn’t understand a single word and kind of felt those people were talking Chinese to me. I was unable to distinguish the words - it sounded all “mrrurheeerrhhh” to me.
It was a real eye-opener to experience the hard way that being fluent in a foreign language doesn’t equal being able to understand certain dialects or slang - or rather: I wasn’t even able to recognize that they spoke English.
So I don’t mind that much anymore, if I can’t understand certain Japanese individuals, as long as I can understand most Japanese people.
@Fingerhut: “…as to understanding every single person who is a native speaker of your target language, I think, that’s true mastery - not even reached by many natives themselves… ;-)”
I’m not sure I would entirely agree with this - I would think there must be only very few native speakers of any language who cannot understand all of their fellow native speakers?
Certainly as a (fairly typical) native speaker of English, I was already being exposed to British, American, Australian and Canadian TV as a kid - and I can never remember having the slightest difficulty in comprehension with any of them!
More recently I have spent some time in the USA too - including in the South - and there was never any question of not understanding anything (or of not being understood.)
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@JayB - have you had the pleasure of dealing with many Scots?
At any rate, I don’t think this idea of “everything”, “perfectly” and “always” is realistic, even with native speakers. I’ve known lots of people who have moved from Australia to the States or vice-versa and have had a few minor (but usually amusing) mix-ups. A friend of mine was travelling in Canada and he said he needed to put on his jumper, and they sort of looked at him funny and then laughed.