The great showdown: French versus English

Read regular guest posts about a Kiwi living abroad in a non-English speaking country.

I mentioned a few posts back (Branching out, letting go) that I’m interested in comparisons between French and English. I guess I’m a bit of a language nerd. For example – how large a vocabulary does a person need in order to cope comfortably in English and in French? Is the number different for each language? I know English has an enormous number of words which it has pinched from other languages, but on a day to day basis, how wide is the range of words that English speakers tend to use? Is it larger or narrower than the French?

No doubt there’s a wealth of academic literature out there on the subject, which one day I might get around to finding and reading. It’s fun just to talk about it though. My Colombian friend Diego, who is interested in all things language, tells me he finds English difficult because the same word can express a lot of different things, particularly depending on what preposition you add to it. For example, in English I might use the word “go” to express a range of actions: go in, go out, go down, go up. In French I have a distinct verb for each: entrer, sortir, descendre, monter. This might partly explain my impression, which I mentioned in an earlier post, that in French I use a wider range of words on a day to day basis than I do in English.

What about how “difficult” a language is to learn? Many French people have told me that French must be very difficult to learn compared to English, because French verb conjugations are much more irregular than English ones. But I’ve found that most of these people are speaking from the experience of having studied English in high school, where they studied verb endings and not much else. Verb endings do not a language make! While verb endings may be easier in English than in French, I suspect that when it comes to speaking fluently, English may be more difficult than French.

For example, there’s pronunciation to consider. The rhythm of spoken English is very different to the rhythm of spoken French. If you intend to speak in English, you have to master the eccentricities of English syllable stress. This is exactly what many French speakers find tricky, because in French all syllables in the word are pronounced at the same intensity. Who knows. And anyway, who can judge how difficult one language is compared to another? I’m sure for every language on earth there is a foreign learner who just “gets it”, and for whom learning the language is never difficult. Even the most finicky little verb endings.

I love it when I see a French idiomatic phrase that is a near-direct translation of its English counterpart. Like *“to make ends meet”: in French you say “joindre les deux bouts”, for which the literal English translation would be “to join the two ends”. When I see phrases like that, I translate them in my head and I smile, because you can instantly recognise their English counterpart. And it makes me feel a bit more at home in the French language.

*This is an idiom that means ‘to earn just enough money to be able to buy the things you need’.

Mihiata  – Saint Nazaire, France