French language challenges!!

It is true that it is NOT impossible to learn a language. But the amount of dedication it takes to learn something from the scratch is absolutely painful and puts you through a lot of self-questioning! I don't exactly remember how my childhood days had passed while learning English or Hindi but learning French after hitting 30 seems like a mammoth task!!

As such French has just too many homophones. I wonder how do they manage to differentiate all those innumerable words - yes, more than they have in English and they have a flair to describe things, not just saying (romanticizing ;-))! French influenced English was considered to be the language of the ruling class in England for a considerable period after the Norman conquest in 1066.

Coming back to my frustration - pour moi, present tense, past tense and some other forms of tenses all sound exactly the same in French. For example, the pronunciation for 'je fais' (I do) and 'j'ai fait' (I did) sounds exactly the same when uttered by the French. So I will lose the whole context if I don't have a grip on at what point in time was the conversation happening in the first place. As such, French is not a loud language (can't say for the French though) so they tend to skip most of the sounds which makes it all the more challenging to understand this mysterious language. I haven't given up yet and there is still hope!! ;-)

What makes French more challenging is, in fact, English! I can't say which is easier as I haven't even come close to B1 level in French but the sentence ordering changes when you speak French. For example, in English we would go for 'orange juice' but in French, it would be 'du jus d'orange' (the juice of orange). Three things happened here: 1) suddenly juice has a gender now; 2) it is always an indirect way of saying juice first and then naming what kind of juice that was; and 3) we are literally using 'some' in French which is an implied factor in English.

All in all, there is a purpose in my life now to unravel the enigmatic conversations that happen around me day in and day out!! So now, I only have to do the following....