Studying French

Looking back, I probably should have chosen Spanish to study rather than French. Where I lived when I could have started my language learning journey (Southern California) and where I live currently (Oregon), there are a lot of native Spanish speakers. But I had a negative experience with a teacher who was trying to peak not only my interest in Spanish but my fellow seventh graders as well. He made me never want to study Spanish again.

When I moved halfway through eighth grade, I transferred to a middle school that taught both Spanish and French. At the time I went to this school, ninth graders went to class at the middle school rather than the high school. I was still interested in studying a foreign language and with my desire to never speak a word of Spanish again, I chose French. And here began my interest in studying the language of France.

It did not occur to me then just how ill-prepared I was to learn a foreign language. I'm a native English speaker, and I've had to take English classes in school. Certainly, that must have been helpful? Not as much as you might think. At least not where all the different tenses are concerned. If you ever look at a chart that lists all the different tenses in English, that's not what they're called in any of the French textbooks I used. I think this is where I struggled the most.

And I was not the only one who seemed to struggle. During the four years I studied French in school, I had two different teachers: the one I had in ninth grade at the middle school, and I had the same teacher for the three years I studied French at my high school. I remember the latter of the two teachers remarking that she was not our English teacher. Before I started taking French, I didn't realize just how important understanding the grammar of the language I grew up speaking would help in studying a foreign language. To this day, I feel like I learned more about English grammar studying French than I did in all my English classes combined.

There were other points of grammar that I had some difficulty wrapping my head around at first, and I think it had a lot to do that I was expecting French to be a lot like English in its word order and that French obeyed much of the same rules of English, which is so not the case. In English, there's only one definite article (the) where in French there are three (le, la, les). Which definite article you use depends on two things: the gender of the noun and the quantity. And speaking of how nouns have gender, adjectives are sometimes spelled differently depending on if the noun is masculine or feminine. Some adjectives need to go in front of the noun (like beau) where some go after (like colors). Oh, and then there are the adjectives where their meaning changes depending on if it is placed in front of the noun or after (cher).

Verb conjugation was another tricky thing to understand, and to this day, I still struggle with it. In French, every subject pronoun has its own conjugation and then you add in that French has two words for 'you' where English we now only use the one. Plus you have to take into account that different verb groups have different rules to one needs to follow and that there are verbs that seem to follow their own rules. It seemed odd to me at first that verbs were either regular verbs or irregular verbs, not realizing then that verbs in English fall into those two categories as well. And just because it's a regular verb in one language does not mean it's a regular verb in another language. In French, the verb for 'to speak' is parler, and it is considered a regular verb. But in English, it's an irregular verb as it does not end with --ed in the past tense (I spoke).

The further I have gone down that rabbit hole of learning French, there are things I've enjoyed more than others. But there is one thing that despite how interesting I find it, I have come to the conclusion it is the evilest thing I have ever encountered: the subjunctive. I find learning about the subjunctive so completely frustrating. It is so complicated there is no way I could explain it all here. The other moods and tenses in French are more straightforward, plus it is not something that we use in English very often and when we do, it's only on formal occasions, plus how we use the subjunctive in English is vastly different from how it is used in French.

I've enjoyed studying French, more so now with all the different resources that are available to me now but weren't when I started studying it in school. I didn't have access to all the websites, apps, and podcasts that I take for granted now. And that is in addition to several of the books I have been able to read to help me make sense of the grammar. The internet has allowed me to practice speaking French in the safety of my own home and meet an assortment of people from around the world.

I no longer have the same distaste for Spanish that I did at the end of seventh grade. I've dabbled in studying it here and there over the years. Not too long ago, I saw this online quiz boasting that it could tell you how fluent in Spanish you were. Out of curiosity, I took it. I scored a 92%.