Learning French to a high level of proficiency is a daunting task, especially if you are doing it on your own.
The good news is that you don't have to know everything to be able to speak quite well.
Just as we use only a small number of all the words in a dictionary, everyday conversation does not require that we master all the intricacies of French grammar.
That being the case, what would be the most important or essential grammatical skills that you need in order to master French? What should you concentrate on first to develop a good foundation? Here are two key areas of grammar that you should consider.
1.
Grammatical gender.
All French nouns are classified as either masculine or feminine.
The so-called masculine words use the articles le and un as in le travail 'the job' or un travail 'a job'.
The feminine category words have the articles la and une, as in la maison 'the house' and une maison 'a house'.
If the noun starts with a vowel or a silent h, the le and la become l', as in l'amour 'love' (masculine) and l'eau water (feminine).
Notice that when a word is written with the article l', there is no indication whether the word is masculine or feminine.
Why is all this so important? In French this key distinction is the foundation of a complex system of gender agreement that requires that words be modified in order for them to agree in gender with the key noun.
Consider the following examples: le vin est bon the wine is good la tarte est bonne the pie is good l'artiste est bon the artist is good l'eau est bonne the water is good Using the indefinite article, we would see things like: un bon vin a good wine une bonne tarte a good pie un bon artiste a good artist une bonne eau a good water We see that French uses either bon or bonne according to whether the key or head noun is masculine or feminine.
These are very simple examples.
Things can get terribly complex because all the words that relate to nouns in a sentence must reflect this gender classification.
If you get this gender wrong, it sounds terrible.
This is by far the number one problem of English-speakers in French because nothing similar exists in English.
When speaking or writing French, you always have to keep in mind the gender of the key noun because you will always have to refer back to it.
The only way to master the system is to learn the gender and the noun at the same time.
Make sure that when you learn a noun you associate it a word that illustrates the gender.
One particularly challenging area of this system is those words that start with l'.
How can you tell that l'amour is masculine and l'eau is feminine? In some cases, the word ending is a good clue.
In most cases though you simply have to learn the right gender by heart.
2.
The verb system.
One of the most difficult but oh so important areas of French to master is the verb system.
Look at the following forms of the present tense of aller "to go": Je vais I go Tu vas You go Il va He goes Elle va She goes Nous allons We go Vous allez You go Ils vont They go (plural he) Elles vont They go (plural she) In English, there are only two forms: go, goes.
In French, there are no less than six different forms to learn.
Not all verbs change as much as this one, but as you can see the system is much more complicated in French than in English.
But that's not all.
Every verb has various tenses with all sorts of unusual forms.
Then there are impersonal verbs and reflexive or pronominal verbs.
And to complicate things further, there is something called the subjunctive mood that hardly exists in English.
Since nearly every sentence in French requires a verb, there's a lot of work involved in mastering the verb system, especially the irregular verbs.
The good news is that although French has thousands of verbs, only quite a small number are used in ordinary conversation.
In fact the following six verbs, ETRE, AVOIR, FAIRE, VOULOIR, POUVOIR and ALLER make up approximately 30% of all verbs in conversations.
Interestingly, all of these verbs are highly irregular.
If you know the most common forms of just these six verbs, you are well equipped to start chatting away in French.
The grammatical gender distinction and the verb system are the two of the main foundations of the French language.
If you want to be successful in learning French to proficiency, these are the two areas that you should concentrate on.