French to English Speech Difficulties

When a speaker of one language begins to learn to speak another language she or he encounters certain predictable problems. This is true regardless of the two languages at least in this one general respect: The aspects of the second language that are most different from the maternal language will be the most difficult to learn, especially if these linguistic elements are pervasive and fundamental.

For example, a native speaker of French who begins to learn English will have problems with the phonological aspects of English that diverge most sharply from French, such as the two different forms of the English diphthong "th". The French speaker tends to pronounce the voiced version of that diphthong more like a "d" and the unvoiced version more like a "t". In other words, the French speaker will attempt to make these English sounds conform to sounds in his or her native language (Carruthers in Long and Richards 191). Moreover, because the phonology of one's native language is so deeply rooted, it will be di

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, English does not do so, which tends to cause difficulties for the French speaker (Womack and Bernstein 102). Trained since birth that every noun has a gender, it is difficult for the French speaker to construct sentences in which the largest majority of nouns are neuter, resulting in constructions like "The car – she is making a funny noise." While these may sound quaint to the speaker of English, it may be maddening to the French speaker to try to remove such grammatically gendered references from his or her speech, using gender instead only to describe the sex of animals and occasionally (in a metaphorical sense) to describe certain inanimate objects like boats as having gender. Chastain (in Allen and Campbell 54) suggests that such systematic syntactical errors can be overcome by teaching language at the level of syntactical units, emphasizing the sentence over the vocabulary word (while not ignoring vocabulary) so that semantic knowledge is imparted at the same time as grammatical and syntactical knowledge. Other substantial syntactical differences between English and French are the placement of the adjective in French in almost all cases after the noun it describes (resulting in sentences like "The car little and red she
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