For Chinese speakers
The challenges
- a language with no family relationship to Chinese;
- conjugation: Chinese verbs don't conjugate;
- articles and gender, which don't exist in Chinese;
- agreement (plural, feminine);
- distinguishing sounds like [ʁ] and [l], [b] and [p];
- intonation: French is not a tonal language.
Tips
- lots of listening and repetition;
- always learn the gender with each noun;
- prioritise the conjugations of the most frequent verbs.
The FSI ranks Chinese among the hardest languages for English speakers, and the reverse is also true: patient, regular study is the key.
🇫🇷 Research and writing: My French
This guide was researched and written by the team at my-french.com, a platform for learning French as a foreign language and the owner of learnfrench.wiki. Put theory into practice: lessons from A1 to C2, quizzes, games, a verb conjugator and a community of learners at my-french.com.