emk wrote:French pronunciation should quickly become easier than English's endless exceptions.
This seems off to me and perhaps one of those stereotypes I mentioned. French pronunciation is perhaps the number one complaint with regard to French; even their neighbours the Spanish and Italians complain about it! Practically every other language around it, even if they aren't very orthographic, pronounces most of the letters, and especially endings. And the same problem clearly extends to listening. At the language cafe I go to it's pretty much all the French learners ever complain about.
This thing about English and its exceptions... They're not 'endless'. In fact the most common ones have been rolled-out so often by now they're getting to be common knowledge. There's really not that many and once you know the word, you know the word and its pronunciation. This is all offset by the lack of a case system and far easier verb conjugation for common verbs.
I've yet to meet the person who starts French and English as a TL2 (especially an 'adult') and nails French pronunciation over English.
emk wrote:French grammar also has a reputation for being tough, but a lot of that is caused by people who try to memorize a book of rules. If you instead read and listen to French, most of the grammar will eventually make intuitive sense. In fact, French has a fairly simple verb system for a romance language and you can do almost everything you'd need to do with about 4 tenses. And the French subjunctive is relatively straightforward, because you only need to use it in a limited number of situations, all of which are completely predictable.
Probably everyone would agree with this in principle, I do. There's too much faffing among teachers and students around stuff you don't really need, but also not focusing on where the real impediments are in French. And there are impediments. Another widely-mentioned notion is that French is 'transparent' and can even be mapped onto e.g. English. No, it can't, it is limited and the structure of e.g. questions, word placement, peculiar particles and a whole host of peculiar ways of constructing very common phrases and locutions makes it actually quite opaque.
Obviously this is less pronounced if someone is already familiar with another romance language and this is so between all of them, but our OP isn't familiar enough by his own admission, so the learning curve is steeper. I'm not going to say: don't learn French or don't start romance languages with French, because that's up to the person, but it's fair play for me not to say anything that would mislead just in order to motivate.
