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11 reasons to study French in 2019
Last summer I achieved a life goal of learning French. I’m now fluent enough to function in most social and professional situations. For years I had plateaued and been sitting at an intermediate level. It took a summer of intensive study, including a month of full immersion in Saguenay, Quebec, to become functionally bilingual.
A good motivation when you’re learning a language is keeping in mind the reasons you want to learn it. I have quite personal reasons for learning French. As a proud Canadian, I’d like to master my country’s two official languages. I’m also a bit of a francophile, and enjoy the films, literature, and music of France and French Canada. It’s important to have these personal reasons, no matter how practical it may otherwise be to learn a language.
French is also, of course, an extremely useful language to learn. Below are some practical reasons for studying French.
1. 275+ million speakers worldwide
While ‘only’ about 80 million people speak French as a first language, it is one of the world’s most widely spoken second languages with perhaps 200 million L2 speakers. In many parts of Africa, French operates as lingua franca, facilitating communication among different peoples who speak different languages. Indeed, there are more French speakers in Africa than there are in Europe, and use of…
