is French an easier language to learn than German?

I have spent a couple months learning German for the purpose of reading German rather than speaking it. As of yet I can't read the healines in Bild.de. But then when I look at Paris Match magazine it seems much easier to pick up what is being written. Is it just me or is French easier to read?

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on February 9, 2012 at 4:21am

Well, this depends on your purpose/perspective.

No language is intrinsically "easier" than any other overall. But some languages may have particular features that make them "easier" for your particular purpose with your particular level of learning.

As a language, English is more closely related to German than it is to French. So, German and English share some very fundamental features. For example, they have a very similar verb system (the main difference being that German still has subjunctive forms, whereas these died out in English a few centuries ago), and much of their "base" vocabulary is essentially the same ("gut" ~ "good", "trinken" ~ "drink" etc).

However:

(a) there was a period when French was the language of the ruling classes in English, and so many French words were loaned into English: "boeuf" > "beef", "peuple" > "people", "traitre" > "traitor", "beauté" > "beauty" etc.

(b) for several hundred years, Latin (or, if you want to see it that way, an "old version of French/Italian/Spanish/Portuguese") was artificially used as a common language between countries in Europe, particularly for scientific and religious use. Patterns of translations generally became established from 'scientific' or 'high-brow' Latin words into the languages of Europe. For example, Latin verbs ending in -are would generally translate to French verbs ending in -er, Spanish verbs ending in -ar, and English verbs ending in -ate.

Because there'd already been an influx of French words into English, this set up a kind of Latin>French>English "automatic translation" process, whereby thousands of Latin/French words readily entered English. Pick practically any English word ending in -ate, and the corresponding French verb is probably the same but ending in -er and the corresponding French noun probably the same but ending in -é. Pick practically any English word ending in -ation, and the French word is probably the same...

Now, it may be that, say, a French word entered the English language in 1500 and the meanings in French and English have diverged slightly over the last 500 years so that they no longer men *exactly* the same. If you look at a dictionary definition of the French word "place", you'll see that it's not always translated by the English word "place", for example.

But, by and large, the result is that an average English speaker actually knows thousands of French words. However, notice that most of these words are "high-brow" words ending in -ate, -ation etc -- i.e. the kinds of words that you might find in more formal writing such as in a newspaper, scientific literature etc.

Or put another way: your test of "how easily can I read a newspaper article?" is a little biased because of a particular area of similarity (common "advanced vocabulary" if you like) between French and English.