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> whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language

I'm also German and had French in upper school for five years, and that was certainly not true for me. In fact, I've yet to encounter a language that you can "complete" within three years of a normal school curriculum.

(I'm not talking about living abroad or specialized language learning curriculums, where you can get proficient in well less than three years.)

Yeah that point might have been a bit exuberant. Nevertheless, after 3-4 years I think you have covered most grammar topics, maybe excluding passe simple and subjonctive. In English you'll continue to learn new concepts such as "contact clauses" etc

I'm only doing this because of the topic of conversation, but you probably meant to say that your point was a bit exaggerated instead of exuberant (which means something along the lines of energetically happy).

That's the only mistake I noticed reading through, so I have to congratulate you - I wouldn't've noticed you weren't a native speaker.

I think exuberant is quite a charming word to use in that context :)

thanks (for the compliment and for correcting me)

Using words that just don't perfectly fit is probably a good illustration of differences between a speaker of near-native proficiency and a native speaker. Choosing odd words here and there.

> The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.

> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

Are you seriously suggesting that French does not have idioms?

I'm puzzled by this, as a French speaker. But strangely, I have heard it being said quite often by people from a variety of native languages. ( never by people that have had to live in a French speaking country )

It could be the structure of the courses. When learning English, you almost go straight to learning those idioms Especially the idiom-like infinite collections of verb + preposition. In French, on the other hand, you will spend an enormous amount of time learning grammar, the exceptions and the exceptions exceptions, and of course stuff like noun genders. It can make you think that learning French is all about technique, while learning English is all about knowing an infinitely large vocabulary while the truth is just that French grammar is awful and writing without spelling mistake is a challenge even for well educated French natives.

Dictionary size is perhaps a poor metric for comparison. An interesting breakdown [1] discusses many different dimensions of language complexities.

A few interesting points:

- 33 unique English words make up 50% of written texts, an d3,000 unique English words make up 95% of English texts. If the notion that 600 French words make up 90% of French texts, does that make French easier or harder than English in this regard (having to know more words, or having to interpret more definitions from context)?

- If you come from a language with gendered nouns, is learning a geographically close language with gendered nouns easier than learning one without gender-specific articles? How does the reverse hold?

- How does regional dialect factor in the language learning? Idioms change in American English from region to region but most words and grammars stay the same. Can the same be said of French, or German? I can drive 100km in Germany and have to say a simple sentence like "I would like apple wine" three very different ways (with, from sight different words) to sound fluent.

from my experience, gramatical gender is always more difficult than no gener, even when you have a native tongue that employs a grammatical gender. In romance langauges, the moon is feminine ("la lune"), in german it is masculine ("der mond"), so for both french and german speakers learning english ("a moon") should be easier, because it does not require learning an additional bit or two of information.

I would argue that dictionary size does not matter for basic language skills, but becomes more important the closer you get to native proficiency.

> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation)

There's no "one, official pronunciation" in French. Far from it. There are several ones, within France, and across French-speaking countries.

What? Do you have any example? I'm not sure I could come up with ten words that are pronounced differently by different kind of French.

'Vingt' and 'moins' are such examples, because their orthographies are so nonsensical that some consider letters to be pronounced and not some others (a bit like 'often' in English).

The parisian dialect is to my knowledge the reference dialect that you can focus on, and it is the prestigious dialect. The situation is different in English where the situation is not clear at all. That however was not the point I was trying to make, rather, I wanted to point out that the volume of the language is more compact, so you reach the point earlier where you "polish" your skills.

How and where do you learn this dialect? How does it differ from 'generic French'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology

'Parisian dialect' just sends to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_French.

I'm sure there are a lot of French idioms, too. Is it less important to learn them than the English ones?

No of course not, GP just sucks at French, but doesn't notice this.