How easy is it for a Hindi speaker to learn French?

Answer 1

I have good news, bad news, and some interesting news!

Good news: Both Hindi and French are languages considered "Indo-European" languages.

The difficulty someone would have in learning a language can sometimes be quantified based on how "close" or "far away" the two languages are, in terms of their linguistic roots. This can estimate how different pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar rules might be between the two languages.

So, it's a good thing that Hindi and French have a common root of "Indo-European" because this means that French might be easier to learn for you than, for example, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, or Navajo.

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Bad news: Within the Indo-European languages, Hindi and French are pretty far away.

French is part of the Italic branch: Italic --> Latino-Faliscan --> Romance --> Italo-Western --> Gallo-Iberian --> Gallic --> Langue d'Oil --> French

Hindi is part of the Indo-Iranian branch: Indo-Iranian --> Indo-Aryan --> Central Indic --> Hindustani --> Hindi

So, it might be much easier for a Hindi speaker to learn Urdu, Sanskrit, or Farsi than it might be to be French.

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Interesting news: The "distance" between new languages is only a guess about how hard it might be for you to learn a new language. It may have nothing to do with how hard you find a new language!

How hard you find a new language usually has the most to do with who your teacher is, whether that teacher has managed to connect with you well, and what your mindset is like as you're going into your lessons and study time. And really, it typically has very little or nothing to do with your "natural" ability for learning new languages!

I personally teach Spanish and Portuguese, so if you'd really like to learn French, I hope you can find a good tutor here on Wyzant for French.

However, if you'd like to learn Spanish or Portuguese, I'd love to offer my tutoring to you! Let me know if I can help!