How to Learn Any Language 46
How to Learn Any Language 46
Farber’s Language Reviews
We have such things as theatre reviews, movie reviews, books reviews, and restaurant reviews to help trusting readers decide which plays, movies, books, and restaurants are worth their time and money.
So here’s a series of language reviews – thumbnail sketches of some of the major languages of the world with comments on their prevalence, their usefulness, the difficulty or ease with which each may be learned, and special characteristics the potential learner should know.
French
After English, French is the world’s most popular second language. Several other languages are spoken by more people: Chinese, English, Hindustani (the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu), Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, and even Portugese count more speakers than French. But French can be heard in practically every corner of the world and is often spoken by the most influential segments of a given population. The old French empire, though not as vast as the British, was nonetheless vast. French is therefore spoken in what you may find a surprising number of countries. So is Chinese, but the French spoken by the educated classes and government officials in Canada, Africa, Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific outweighs in cultural influence the Chinese spoken in the Chinatowns of America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Burma, Vietnam, London, and everywhere else.
French no longer deserves its reputation as “the language of diplomacy” (during how many summit meetings since World War II have the chiefs of state been able to communicate even one simple thought to each other in French?), but never mind. French is still respected and revered as a language of cultured people the world over.
Fully sixty percent of all those who come to practice parties at the Language Club in New York come seeking practice in French. Efforts to convince Americans shopping
around for a language to learn to shift their attentions from French to currently more advantageous languages like Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic are usually unavailing. It’s French they want!
French lies in the middle range of difficulty to learn. The grammar is mercifully simple, but correct pronunciation with a decent French accent is hard to achieve. And for some reason, bad French comes across as much worse than bad German, bad Italian, bad Spanish, or bad anything else. The native French ear and French attitude are unforgiving.
There are no noun cases, but verbs inflect and adjectives must agree with nouns. There’s a subjunctive mood you’re strongly urged to learn even though the younger French themselves increasingly ignore it.
If you’re planning to study French along with other languages, make sure you learn French best of all. You will be judged in the world by your French, and no matter how well you handle Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian, or Indonesian, you will not be regarded as a person of language accomplishment if your French is poor.