I can put up with exotic alphabets, funny vocabulary and complex grammar. But 5 ways of pronouncing “e” of which I could hear only one (unaccented) and the remaining 4 were impossible for me to hear. It felt like Asian tonal languages where I cannot hear the tones at all. And they have those asking words like “what” at the length of an average Norwegian sentence. And then they pronounce as little as 60% of the letters they write 🤷♀️ Being very sarcastic and exaggerating here, but thank you for finally making me understand why I struggled so much and gave up French.
J'ai connu beaucoup d'Anglais à Londres ou en France qui parlaient le français à la perfection, sans accent notable. Comme quoi il est difficile de généraliser. Il est vrai qu'il faut avoir l'oreille musicale pour bien appréhender les sons inconnus de sa propre langue. Mon beau-père alsacien, n'a jamais su prononcer les j, d, b, à la française mais disait par exemple "che va terrière le pois" pour " je vais derrière le bois" ou "un boulet chéant" pour "un poulet géant". Et ceci après 30 années passées en Lorraine romane.
@@BenLlywelyn Oui, je suis entièrement d'accord avec vous Ben. J'avais des amies chinoises il y a quelques années, qui s'amusaient à me faire répéter des mots de mandarin, que je massacrais littéralement. Elles trouvaient ça hilarant! Bravo pour votre site, très bien fait et intéressant. J'apprends beaucoup de choses sur les langues celtiques et autres. En tant que Français, je me considère aussi un peu Celte, Gaulois, en plus de Romain, Germain...Les Français considèrent que leurs ancêtres étaient gaulois, portent le nom d'une tribu germanique, les Francs et parlent une langue romane dérivée du latin vulgaire. C'est l'Europe.😀
6:09 I'm pretty sure "ou" and "où" are pronounced exactly the same way, the accent grave is there to disambiguate them in writing, like "la" and "là" or "a" and "à".
I think the main difficulties for English speakers arise from the phonology (some sounds that are specific to the French language), from the spelling (however, the French spelling is very regular compared to the English spelling) and the verb conjugation that brings some complexity to the game. The existence of grammatical genders for nouns also plays a role in increasing the degree of difficulty of the French language. For me, as a speaker of another Romance language (Romanian), learning French was not very difficult.
Bonjour Ben, merci pour une présentation trés intéressante! En parlant de différents sons qui sont difficile à prononcer, je travaille toujours le 'll' du Cymraeg...😅
Oui, le son 'll' du pays des galles est très unique. Mais il existe en l'amérique indigiene, dan les langues altïque, au tibet et aussi en afrique. Merci.
@@BenLlywelyn interestingly that "ll" sound is also present in some parts of the Logudoro province of Sardinia. I have relatives who are affected by "Sardopatia" (our own version of Dacopatia) who swear that Sardinia and Scotland are actually incredibly similar culturally. I'm not entirely sure that's true but it may be something you'd be interested in looking into.
That's really cool, actually. The Anglo-Norman/Old French word was "fenestre" ("fenestra" in Latin). I'd imagine the word entered Welsh through either Old Norman or Latin.
I am way too old to learn another language. All languages have peculiar aspects. My parents spoke Maltese and never mastered English even after living in Australia for 50 years. I cannot speak Maltese, and just speak English. And all languages have idiomatic sayings which you don't learn when being taught a language. English has words with silent consonants like the K in knight, and the gh which can have different pronunciation.
I was waiting for when you somehow make it seem less intimidating. As if there was some catch waiting for us at the end 😂 I literally just started a few weeks ago. My goal is about 2 years. So far all is as expected. It’s neither easier nor more difficult than I imagined. I taught myself Portuguese to a conversational/B1 level in about a year and a half. Hard to find anyone to practice with. French on the other hand is indeed easier to come by. And yes, I’m actually pretty surprised by how lexical similar French is to both Portuguese & Spanish. It’s like the words that aren’t English cognates are Romance cognates. My listening skills are a little better than I thought they’d be but pronouncing them is a very different story to simply understanding them. Anyway, that’s my rant, nice vid
@@BenLlywelyn Eu fiz uma lista de vários verbos e substantivos. Em vez de escrever as traduções no inglês ao lado delas, as-escrevei no português. Ou seja, estou “language stacking” porque meu interesse no português está indo e ainda não quero deixar-lo como já tinha feito quando era mais jovem. Bom sim, fiquei espantado às semelhanças entre francês e português. Não somente os vogais nasais mas o mesmo léxico me-pareço semelhante demais e mais do que os congados espanhóis. Eu lei que o francês é lexicalmente um pouco mais perto ao espanhol do que espanhol (79% vs 75% ou algo assim) então por isso eu fique um pouco espantado.
J'aime la langue française parce que ce n'est pas difficile du tout, j'ai commencé à l'apprendre à l'école quand j'avais 12 ans et je l'ai tellement aimé que je suis devenue la meilleure élève de ma classe de français dès le début. Mais c’était il y a longtemps et à cause du manque de pratique pendant des années, ma conversation est devenue assez rouillée… mon style est devenu démodé et sec.
C'est difficile quand tu n'ai pas aucun pour parler la langue avec eux bien sûr, mais tu as raison. C'est une langue belle a une grande nombre de ressources d'apprentisage.
Je trouve que votre français vaut largement celui des Français, comme moi. Vous être très douée. On dirait que vous vivez en France ou dans un pays de langue française. Vous devez être prof de français? Félicitations.
... qu'est-ce que c'est que c'est que ça ... ??? ... French is not difficult ... French is archaic and absurd ... just to say the least ... ... you don't need to study it ... English is enough or Spanish ... !!! ... period ... !!! ... greetings from Miami, the Capital of the Sol ... 🌻
Great job on the Welsh Zionist vid bro. You've come on a long way since you first started. Maybe a bit much on some of the cheesy fades and effects but the content is gold. Gwych.
Really interesting points about the vowels. Maybe that's why, as a native English speaker, I'm not fazed so much by pronunciation in languages with fewer vowels like Hebrew and Spanish, but French seems very intimidating. And non-English consonants, while potentially challenging, seem easier to distinguish by ear, such as the French R (which it shares with Hebrew incidentally) or Spanish R.
Every language ever laughing: hahaha. French laughing: hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh hoh-hoh-hoh-hoh. 😄😄😄 They love making everything sound dramatic. My municipality ( Rotterdam, the Netherlands) send everyone in the city mail about changed garbage collecting rules. It was in 7 languages because , you know, multi-culti. 🙄 In every language the word for the garbage bins was 3 letters. ( bak, bin etc. ) Only in french it was 8 letters. Their word is: poubelle. POUBELLE! 😆 They just like to pretend everything they say is very profounding so they just added at least 5 useless Letters to every word. 😂
