Is French hard to learn for English speakers?

French is one of the easier languages for an English speaker — the US diplomats' language school puts it in its easiest category — but the ease is lopsided. Its vocabulary is the most generous of any language we have measured, and English borrowed thousands of French words in the first place. Its sounds are the opposite: what you read is not what you hear, and what you hear runs together. This post measures both halves, plus the one everyone asks about, gender.

Updated 7 October 2026 · 7 min read

The easy part: the words

On 318 million words of French film and television dialogue, 64 word forms make up half of everything said, and 1,076 make up 80%. On samples of equal size, French has the steepest frequency curve of all seven languages we compared, at every point from the hundredth word to the ten-thousandth — steeper than Spanish, Italian or German. The comparison is in which language has the steepest frequency curve, and what it means in days and weeks is in how long it takes to learn French.

And much of the rest is familiar. English took thousands of words from French after 1066 — question, important, possible, table, justice — so written French is full of words an English reader can guess. That help stops at the ear: question is spelt the same in both languages and sounds quite different.

The hard part: spelling and sound

French spelling preserves how the language was pronounced around the twelfth century, and the pronunciation has moved on since. The result, in Wikipedia's summary, is "a complicated relationship between spelling and sound, especially for vowels; a multitude of silent letters; and many homophones". Standard French distinguishes up to 13 oral vowels and up to 4 nasal ones, against Spanish's 5.

What that means in practice is easiest to see with words that sound exactly alike. Here are ten sets of everyday French words, each pronounced identically, with how often each spelling turns up in dialogue:

The ear hears /pø/ about 4,219 times in every million words and has to decide from context whether it was peux, peut or peu. Verbs are the worst case: aime, aimes and aiment — "I love", "you love", "they love" — are one sound, so the ending you learn to write is often an ending you never hear. Going the other way, a learner who has only read French will mispronounce a word like ils parlent, which ends in three silent letters.

The system is kinder in one direction. Given a written word, the rules mostly tell you how to say it; it is spelling a word you have only heard that is hard.

Words that run together: liaison and elision

French does not leave gaps between words the way English does.

Liaison. A silent final consonant comes back to life before a vowel: les is /le/ and amis is /ami/, but les amis is /lez‿ami/. It is obligatory in a small set of very frequent places — after les, des, nous, vous and ils before a vowel, so vous avez begins with a /z/ — optional in many others, and forbidden in a few: never after et, and never before an "aspirated h", which is why les héros has no /z/. Getting the obligatory ones wrong sounds like an error; making optional ones sounds formal.

Elision. Short words drop their vowel before another vowel, and the spelling shows it with an apostrophe: je ai becomes j'ai, le homme becomes l'homme, ce est becomes c'est. Because the subtitle corpus keeps those clipped words as tokens of their own, we can count them: c', j', l', d', qu', n', s', m' and t' together are 6.8% of every word said — about one in 15.

Together, liaison and elision are why a sentence you could read easily can go past you as one long word. They are a large part of why French is harder to follow than to read, and why a course has to make you listen from the first day.

Gender: every noun has one

Every French noun is masculine or feminine, and the article shows it: le livre, la table. Of the 6,802 nouns in our French list that take one gender, 55% are masculine. Elision makes it harder, because l' hides the gender of the noun after it — and l' alone is said 11,550 times per million words.

The good news is that a noun's ending often tells you its gender, and some endings are close to certain. We tested the usual rules on every one of those nouns:

The suffix rules are excellent: every one of our 377 nouns in -tion is feminine, and -ment is masculine 99% of the time (la jument, a mare, is the exception). The rule people actually quote, "a final -e means feminine", is right only 70% of the time — and its exceptions include some of the commonest nouns in the language: le monde, le père, l'homme, le problème. Learn the suffixes as rules and learn everything else with its article.

German has the same problem with three genders instead of two; how its rules compare is in German articles and the gender rules.

The verbs

French verbs change for person, tense and mood, much like Spanish ones, and the commonest verbs are the most irregular: être, avoir and aller alone are a large share of everything said. The full ranking, with every form added up, is in the 100 most common French verbs. The difference from Spanish is that many of the forms sound alike, which helps when you speak (je parle, tu parles, il parle — say it once and it is right three times) and hurts when you write.

So is French hard?

• Vocabulary: easy. The steepest frequency curve we measured, and thousands of words English already borrowed.
• Reading: easy to start, because the spelling is regular in the reading direction and the vocabulary is familiar.
• Listening and spelling: the real work. Silent letters, sets of words that sound identical, and liaison and elision running words together.
• Gender: a memory load, lightened by suffix rules that are close to certain, and not by the "-e is feminine" rule.

The US Foreign Service Institute's estimate sums it up: 30 weeks of full-time study, the same as Spanish and at the slow end of its easiest group. If you are choosing between French and another language, Spanish or French and French or German set them side by side.

The 1,000 most common French words are free and in frequency order, and can be downloaded as a printable PDF or a CSV for Excel or Anki. The French vocabulary test tells you in two minutes how many of them you already know, and the French course teaches them in that order, with every new word heard as well as read.

Sources

• Foreign Service Institute, National Foreign Affairs Training Center: language learning timelines, checked 2026-09-25.
• Wikipedia: French orthography — spelling based on Old French pronunciation of about 1100–1200, silent letters, homophones such as sang, sans and cent, and parle, parles, parlent all /paʁl/; Liaison (French)) — mandatory, optional and forbidden contexts, les amis, aspirated h; French phonology — up to 13 oral and 4 nasal vowels.
• The pronunciation of each homophone set was checked against the words' IPA in Wiktionary, 3 October 2026.
• 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. The homophones, elided forms and gender rules are listed in scripts/frequency_extras.py (french_hard); the genders are those of our own French word list.