It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

Susanna is fluent in several languages, and has written a few books. It's always interesting getting her take on language learning at any age.

I'm an English-native speaker living in a French-speaking part of a country with a number of national languages. I speak fluent French, and I suspect Americans/British would call my German fluent too, but it isn't in my view. I have small bits of other languages.

To qualify fluent French is hard without sounding like a "humblebrag", but, I insist on doing French for everything locally and am often more comfortable in French than my local friends are in English.

I feel like the author is both simultaneously making excuses and being overly hard on herself. If the expectation is to learn French to the level of les immortels de l'académie française... yes, I know she did not say that, but this is a standard to which any non-native will always fall short. The complaints she makes that there is ever-more-specific vocabulary, new gaps and having words that simply don't stick in your mind are simply all part of my daily life. It takes an enormous, persistent effort and continual use to really get good at a language.

A possible difference between myself and the author (although I'm unsure, given her past ability in Portuguese) is that I started learning French when I was 9, had the good fortune to have one good French teacher for a year who taught me everything I've ever needed for languages (learn grammar by heart, as much vocab as you can and seek to immerse yourself as much as you can), I worked on my languages outside of school and I moved to my current country in my mid-20s. I don't have the fear of being wrong other people have mentioned.

The author writes the article as if French specifically is difficult, but the only real point she makes that diverges from other languages is the existence of l'académie française. I actually agree that French specifically is difficult for English speakers (and my German speaking friends believe it is difficult for them as well). Where I am there are large numbers of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants and they integrate far more successfully and learn better French, statistically, than other nationalities. Their languages are all from the romance family and have closer structure and form than to English or German. Concepts that are fairly rare in English, such as the subjunctive (English: if I were bilingual) are very important in French. The structure of a French sentence is typically different to how English sentences are structured, such that a direct translation will almost always sound a bit foreign. There are a large number of false friends. Gendered nouns are a foreign concept to English speakers and the only way to get this right is to learn them with the noun. Similarly, verbs can take à or de for their indirect objects and again you can only learn this, it is almost impossible to guess. These are still challenges for romance language natives, but less so.

However, on the side of the author being overly hard on herself, the reverse of the above is also true. France is a comparatively monolingual country and I have acquaintances there to whom I can only speak in French, as they never pursued a foreign language. Not all French speakers who speak English have a full mastery of it: I'm helping some of my local friends study for their exams and some of them have extreme difficulty switching out of the French way of thinking. Those that do still trip up on the little details, like "I am in the train" because "I am on the train" translated into French means literally on top of the roof, and "I am thinking to write on hackernews" instead of "I am thinking of writing on hackernews" because the gerund does not exist in French; the infinitive form takes its place. I am not surprised to hear the French often think they are bad at French - in my native country, many people are very bad at English.

Outside the author's specific problems and the particular difficulty of French for English speakers, the difficulty of learning languages for English native speakers is due to the hegemony of English language and culture. There is a far greater incentive for others to learn English. My local friends hate films dubbed in French (actually so do I, it's usually very poor quality) so they grew up with English films with subtitles in French (VO instead of VF). They listen to English music and tag their photos with English words they like on instagram. The efforts of l'académie française to introduce quotas for French music (https://www.franceinter.fr/societe/quel-quota-pour-la-chanso...) and promote the French language are in conflict with the fact that, at least where I am, masters level courses and above are taught in English and many good jobs either require it or list it as an advantage. For a young European today, learning English opens up a lot of opportunities and there is an enormous amount of easy, enjoyable material from which to learn.

I've no idea how good the author's French truly is, but if she's understanding a first aid course I am going to guess pretty good. In my view she is being overly defeatist and unfair on herself. I have no doubt it is easier to start young, but I also believe that setting too much store the studies she mentions ("studies say I'm losing my ability to learn languages, my French is not perfect, well, I should give up") is unhelpful. If in 20 years she still lives in France, I think she would regret it if she stopped trying to improve now.

So it really depends on what you mean by "leaning to speak a language". You can learn to speak at an intermediate level just by taking courses for a couple of years, dedicated study with books/tapes, etc. But I don't mean that.

I mean getting to the point where it being a foreign language becomes a non-issue. Where you can travel to the country and interact fully in any social conversation, normally understanding every single word (i.e. at the same level of your native language) and speaking with appropriate vocab and grammar so everybody understand every word of yours. Without having to constantly ask for clarification, or just "not get" half of it, or constantly re-explain what you meant using other words because people were confused the first time you said something.

They're worlds apart. And that real fluency just absolutely requires thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of constant real-life interaction (and real-time correction, whether from friends or coworkers or romantic partners) in the language. There aren't any shortcuts to that.