Of the difficulties of learning French

"Des difficultés d'apprendre le français"
French C1 writing exercise

Mike and Jane discuss the challenges they encountered learning French.

Pay attention to the hints!

Some vocabulary you may want to look up before or during this exercise: "mother tongue", "linguistic", "a challenge", "grammatical knowledge", "to throw (=confuse)", "to turn out to [do]", "off the top of my head (without reflection)", "Pilates".

I’ll give you some sentences to translate into French

  • I’ll show you where you make mistakes
  • I’ll keep track of what you need to practise
  • Change my choices if you want
Start the exercise

Here's a preview of the text for the writing challenge, when you're ready click the start button above:

- Before I started learning French, everyone had warned me that grammar would be essential, but I didn't expect it to be so complicated! I had never realised before then how simple English grammar was compared to most other languages. I almost wish I was born in another country, so my mother tongue would have prepared me for these linguistic challenges. - Luckily, I had already studied German, which gave me solid grammatical knowledge. The thing that threw me was the pronunciation. Even words that look absolutely identical turn out to sound completely different! Off the top of my head, I can think of a few examples I really struggled with. I remember listening to a text about pirates one day, and thinking he was talking about Pilates!

I'll be right with you...