This paper examines some of the most significant difficulties that French speakers encounter when they begin to learn English. While concentrating on syntactical and phonological problems, the study also explores some of the grammatical and articulative difficulties faced by French speakers as they begin their road to fluency in English. However, before proceeding to the particulars of learning English as a second language for Francophones, a few general notes are in order.
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 difficult for the speaker of French to shift pronunciation of these diphthongs so that they more closely approximate a native English speaker's pronunciation of them.
In a similar vein, elements of the two languages that are very different from each other but that are not pervasive will be much easier to learn. For example, the French expression "J'ai faim", which translates literally to "I have hunger" is of course in English formed as "I'm hungry", with the ...