French is Complicated.

I was in an analytical mood this week, and so I decided to compare two roughly equivalent sentences in English and French and figure out which one is harder to say. Here they are:

I was responsible for the good health of the team.

J'ai été responsable pour la bonne santé de l'équipe.

I chose this sentence because my French friend said it to me the other night and I later realized that I'm not exactly sure how he said it. I could understand perfectly what he meant, but for all I know the sentence above is wrong. If I need to say it to somebody French, they might not even understand me. But let's look at the English first.

"I was responsible for the good health of the team."

In order to speak this sentence you need to know:

-1 pronoun (I)
-2 nouns
-2 adjectives
-2 prepositions
-1 article (the)
-1 verb that has 2 possible conjugations for the required tense (was, were)

There is one decision that has to be made, whether to use the plural or singular conjugation of the verb. The correct usage is determined by the subject, which has already been spoken (I), and therefore you will have heard yourself speaking it as you are deciding which form to use. In the same way that it is easier to sing one note after another in a scale rather than just hitting one note out of the blue, I think this makes a huge difference.

Summary: You need to know 10 things and make 1 decision with oral aid.

Now, lets look at the French. You need to know:

1 pronoun (Je)
2 nouns
2 adjectives, each of which has 4 possible forms
2 prepositions, one of which has 3 or more possible forms (I'm not sure)
3 possible articles, along with another shortened form
1 verb tense form
1 verb with 6 possible conjugations

There's a lot to talk about here. Where do I start? Let's start with the articles. French nouns are masculine, feminine, or plural. If they are singular and start with a vowel or silent h, they receive a shortened form of the article (l') So for both santé and equipe, the speaker has to consider whether they are masculine, feminine, plural, or start with a vowel or an h. This decisions have to be made BEFORE the speaker actually says the noun in question, so there is no oral aid. Just so you don't get lost, all of this is in place of saying "the."

Now we can look at adjectives. Adjectives are required to agree with the noun they modify. Fortunately we have already come up with the gender, number, and form of santé in order to create the article, so now we just have to pick which one of the 4 possible adjective forms corresponds (bon, bonne, bons, or bonnes). Fortunately in this case, and honestly in most (but not all) cases in French, all four of those forms are pronounced the same, so if you say the wrong one it won't sound wrong. If, however, you pick wrong in writing, you lose points on a test...
The other adjective is acting as a direct object, so I think it is supposed to be in agreement with the subject (Je). This, of course, will change based on whether the speaker is male or female. And this time the key has already been spoken, so you do have oral assistance. (To keep on pace, we have now found the equivalent of "good" and "responsible")

One of our prepositions is also variable based on gender and number. "De" with a feminine is "de la," with a masculine is "du," and with a plural is "des." Except, of course, for certain circumstances when you drop the article entirely and just use "de." And I am not at all clear on what those circumstances are. So I'm not sure that I got it right, and that's the main reason that I if I spoke to a French person they might not be able to figure out what I am trying to say. (We now have "of.")

The other major difficulty is the verb. I have used passé composé here because I think perhaps that is what my friend used and that is the only vaguely appropriate tense I have been taught so far. However, I'm thinking that based on the context it should probably be a verb tense called "imparfait" that doesn't really have an equivalent in English. But let's look at passé composé, since that's what I know.

Passé composé is a compound verb. The second part (été, for "to be") has only one conjugation, but the first part has 6. Technically the key is spoken first, HOWEVER, because the conjugation for first person singular begins with a vowel, the "je" turns into "j." So you actually have to know the conjugation you will use before you say the noun.

quick disclaimer- I didn't include picking the correct verb tense as a choice for either language. So you could add to each 1 more decision without oral aid, if you wish, and a massive number of words (more massive in French). However, I consider it to be more vocab than decision. "Was" and "to be" are technically two forms of the same word but they don't generally rest that way in my head. So, quick comparison of the two with that disclaimer in place:

English: You need to know 10 words and make 1 decision with oral aid.

French: You need to know 25 words, make 1 decision with oral aid and 5 decisions without oral aid, and even knowing all that I'm not sure that I'm correct.


In short, in English you can start talking and make up the sentence as you go. In French you have to know everything you are going to say before you say it, make a bunch of executive decisions very quickly without oral cues, and then you get start thinking about liasons. That's the way the French don't pronounce their words one at a time. Instead, they often say the second half of one word along with the first part of the next one. The result is a beautiful, flowing language... whose speakers can't understand a foreigner who pronounces words as they are written.