French or German: which should you learn?
French and German are the two big languages of western Europe after English, and for an English speaker they are hard in opposite ways. French hides its grammar in its sounds; German puts its grammar on the surface, in endings you have to choose every time you speak. This post sets the measurable differences side by side, and then says which kind of learner each one suits.
The numbers side by side
| French | German | |
|---|---|---|
| FSI time to professional level | 30 weeks (690 class hours) | 36 weeks (828 class hours) |
| FSI category | I | II |
| Native speakers | about 74 million | about 95 million |
| Second-language speakers | about 238 million | about 80–85 million |
| Word forms that make up half of speech | 64 | 91 |
| Share of speech covered by the first 1,000 forms | 79.4% | 77.6% |
| Word forms needed for 95% of speech | 13,909 | 21,502 |
| Noun genders | 2 | 3 |
| Grammatical cases | none on nouns | 4 |
The speaker figures are those in each language's Wikipedia article on 2026-09-28; the word figures come from film and television dialogue, the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus, which is close to how people speak.
Time: German takes longer
The Foreign Service Institute, which trains US diplomats, puts French in its easiest category at 30 weeks and German in the next one up at 36. Six weeks of full-time study is a real difference — at the FSI's rate of 23 class hours a week, well over a hundred hours of class — and it comes almost entirely from grammar, not from words. German is the closer relative of English, and its everyday vocabulary shows it: Hand, Haus, Wasser, trinken, kommen, gut.
Words: French is faster, but German is close
On the first thousand words the two are nearer than their reputations suggest:
- French
- German
| Language | First 100 | First 500 | First 1,000 | First 2,000 | First 5,000 | First 10,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| French | 56.6% | 73.9% | 79.5% | 84.7% | 90.7% | 94.5% |
| German | 51.4% | 71.1% | 77.6% | 83.0% | 89.1% | 92.9% |
French has the steepest curve of any language we have measured — 64 word forms are half of all French speech — and German is not far behind, at 91 — fewer than Spanish or Italian need. The difference opens up further out. German builds new words by joining old ones, so its long tail is longer: 95% of German speech takes 21,502 word forms, against 13,909 for French. In practice that matters later than people fear. A quarter of the different word forms in German subtitles are fifteen letters or longer (25.2%), but together they are only 0.58% of what is said. The famous compounds are rare; everyday German is short words. How many words you need to speak German measures that in detail.
Sounds: French is the harder one
This is where French pays for its fast start. French has up to 13 oral vowels and 4 nasal ones, its spelling leaves much of what is written unpronounced (ils parlent), and words run together in speech (vous avez is one sound). A learner can know every word of a French sentence and still not catch it.
German, by comparison, is written the way it sounds. There are sounds to learn — the ch of ich and Buch, the vowels written ü and ö — but once learned, a German word on the page tells you how to say it, and a word you hear can usually be spelt. That makes learning to hear German a more predictable job than learning to hear French.
Grammar: German is the harder one
German nouns have 3 genders, and the words around them change for 4 cases: der Mann (the man, as subject), den Mann (as object), dem Mann (to the man), des Mannes (of the man). Six forms of "the" — der, die, das, den, dem, des — are together 5.7% of everything said in German, and every one of them is a decision about gender and case. Then there is word order: the verb goes second in a main clause and to the very end of a subordinate one (weil ich müde bin, "because I am tired").
French grammar has its own work — two genders, a large verb system, a subjunctive — but its nouns do not change for case, and its word order is mostly close to English. Is German hard to learn sets out the German side in full.
Which should you learn?
- Choose French if you want to be reading and speaking simple sentences soonest, if you like grammar you can mostly absorb rather than calculate, and if you are ready to spend real time on listening. Its words pay off fastest of any language measured.
- Choose German if you want a language that sounds the way it is written, if systematic grammar suits you — the cases are hard, but they are rules, and they are learnable — or if your plans involve Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Expect the FSI's extra weeks to be spent on endings.
- Either way, start with the commonest words. Both curves say the same thing: the first thousand words are most of what you will hear.
The 1,000 most common French words and the 1,000 most common German words are free and in frequency order, and the French course and the German course teach from them. If Spanish is also on your list, Spanish or French makes the same comparison, and English speakers already know more German than they think: German words used in English.
Sources
- Foreign Service Institute, National Foreign Affairs Training Center: language learning timelines, checked 2026-09-25.
- Wikipedia: French language — speaker figures from Ethnologue; German language — native speakers rounded to the nearest five million, second-language speakers from Eurobarometer; both checked 2026-09-28.
- Wikipedia: French phonology — "up to 13 oral vowels and up to 4 nasal vowels"; German grammar — three genders and four cases.
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every figure is computed by
scripts/frequency_curves.pyand printed from its output rather than typed.