Le français - French!

French is the second language I undertook. It started in high school, and I began learning it begrudgingly; I was not terribly interested in the language. My high school education in the language was weak, to say the least, and after I graduated, there was a hiatus in which I didn't pick up the language again for a long time. My skills soon vanished. After I started to learn Latin, however, I reacquired what I had forgotten and learned lots of new stuff in the blink of an eye. French is often the language I put my electronic devices in. My computer's system language is in French; my phone would be in French, if it had the option. My tablet is in French. Even the language that this blog is presented to me with is in French!

I. What is it?

As previously hinted at, French is a Romance language. That means that the language descended from Latin. It shares roots with other Romance languages; Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Portuguese, Sicilian, etc. Historically spoken in France and Belgium, it expanded quickly and by this time there are many other emmigrant communities where French is the primary or recognized language, such as the Romandy region of Switzerland, Quebec, the Acadia region of Canada, Haiti, and many African countries. For a long time, French was the international norm; one could not be considered educated unless he or she spoke French. English has largely supplanted it in the modern day, but French still maintains its status as a working language of many international organizations.

II. How does it work?

As a Romance language, French retains some notable features that previously existed in Latin: There are two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. These grammatical genders determine how adjectives, articles and other grammatical features behave when tied to them. There are a significant number of verb inflections that do not exist and are used in ways that differ from English. The syntax has since lost Latin's complex case system; assignment of grammatical function is reduced to the same level as English, in that word order largely determines what a word is doing.

III. Anything peculiar about it?

The most obvious and prominent peculiarity about French is the sound of the language. Many English speakers notice that right away. Historically, the French accent has mostly elided the final syllable of many, many words and often times, vowels are elided when the sound conflicts. In that light, the language is meant to flow from your mouth. Some examples of this phenomenon:
Le arbre ("the tree") => L'arbre.
Ce était ("it/that/this was") => C'était.

Therein lies another peculiarity about French: the liason. A liason is when the elision that normally occurs at the end of a word is "attached" to the beginning of the next word. More examples of this phenomenon will be given first with IPA, and then approximated (very roughly) in standard English:

Elles en achèteront demain. ("They will buy some tomorrow.") /ɛl.z‿ɑ̃.n‿aʃtəʁɔ̃ dəmɛ/ (Ellz ahn ashtuh-roh duh-muh)
Normally "elles" is pronounced /ɛl/ with no pronunciation of the -s. Notice that -ont is not pronounced the way it looks, and the -n in demain is unpronounced.

Nous n'avons pas encore eu de jour ensoleillé ce mois-ci; seulement des nuages et de la pluie. ("We haven't had a single sunny day yet; only clouds and rain.")
/nu navɔ̃ pa.z‿ɑ̃kɔʁ ø də ʒuʁ ɑ̃sɔleje cə mwa-si; sœlmɑ̃ de nyaʒ e də la plɥi/ (Noo navoh pahz ehcore uh duh joor ensolayay suh mwah see; suhlmoh day noo-ahj ay duh lah ploo-ee.)
Complicated, huh? See the liason?

IV. What do I like about it?

It's a Latin based language. I love that I can recognize so many elements from Latin without a second glance. I also like the sound. Everyone likes the sound, of course, but in my head, French is like Latin with a very particular accent. It's great when I can nail that very interesting pronunciation and understand all the parts, especially since French feels like it's spoken very quickly. In fact, it's not; all the elision creates the illusion of speed in speech. Have you ever tried to read lyrics to a song in French while the singer sings it at the same time? Not easy!

V. Difficulty in learning it?

French is actually not as difficult as Japanese. While it is still different from English and still requires you to drop your English speaking mindset, it's not as different from English as Japanese is. There are still some things that will make your learning experience vary in difficulty.

• Things that make your life hard

1. The pronunciation. There are several sounds that simply do not exist in English.
2. The genders. English used to make one single grammatical gender distinction maybe 50 years ago (a male was "blond" but a female was "blonde"), but we don't do that anymore (everyone is blonde now).

• Things that make your life easy

1. Despite the pronunciation being very different from English, it's very regular (as opposed to English and its high inconsistency regarding pronunciation).
2. There are some vague similarities in the syntax that mirror English. It's a Subject-Verb-Object type of language, for example (as is English).
3. In our history, English speakers borrowed a huge percentage of our vocabulary from French. Therefore, there's a large number of words that appear very similar or identical to their English counterparts and even mean the same thing. Words that end in -nce (entrance, assistance, maintainance, importance) are of French origin, for example.

VI. Sample text

Les traductions grisées sont des traductions indirectes. En d'autres mots, ces sont des traductions des traductions et non des traductions de la phrase principale. Si une phrase islandaise a une traduction anglaise et la phrase anglaise a une traduction en swahili, alors, indirectement, ça phrase Swahili fournira une traduction pour la phrase islandaise.

"Grey translations are indirect translations. In other words, they are translations of translations and not translations of the principle phrase. If an Icelandic phrase has an English translation and the English phrase has a translation in Swahili, then, indirectly, that Swahili phrase will supply a translation for the Icelandic phrase."

Links:
French-English verb conjugation comparison
Serge Gainsbourg et Brigitte Bardot - Bonnie and Clyde (Song)