Obstacles Fréquents pour Anglophones

What this page is

If you've been studying French for a year or two and certain things still feel impossible, you're not alone — you're hitting the predictable English-speaker roadblocks. These are the points where English gives no useful intuition and where the rules feel arbitrary. The good news: they're a small list. There are about seven major roadblocks; everything else in French is either similar to English or learnable through ordinary exposure.

This page identifies each roadblock, explains why English speakers in particular get stuck on it, and points to the targeted drill page. The fastest way to break through B1 into B2 is to attack these specifically — not to push more vocabulary or read more text, but to drill the seven structures that are blocking you.

Roadblock 1: Gender of nouns

Every French noun is masculine or feminine, and the gender is mostly not predictable from the noun's meaning. Une chaise (chair) is feminine; un fauteuil (armchair) is masculine. Une voiture (car) is feminine; un véhicule (vehicle) is masculine. The gender lives in the word, not in the concept.

Why it's hard for English speakers: English doesn't have grammatical gender at all. There's no English structure to graft French gender onto. Native speakers of Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese have a head start because they're used to the concept, even if the specific genders differ. English speakers are starting from zero.

The honest truth: there's no royal road. You have to learn the gender as part of the word. Une voiture, never voiture. Un problème, never problème. See gender of nouns errors and the statistical patterns in gender by ending.

Drills that work:

• Always learn a noun with its article. Write flashcards as un livre, not livre.
• Memorize ending patterns: -tion, -té, -ure, -ance/-ence are nearly always feminine; -eau, -ment, -isme are nearly always masculine.
• Memorize the hidden-gender traps: un problème, un système, un programme (masculine despite the -e).
• For common mistakes, drill the high-frequency exceptions until they're automatic.

Roadblock 2: Subjunctive triggers

The French subjunctive doesn't have a natural English parallel. English does have a vestigial subjunctive (I suggest that he be there, if I were you), but it's marginal — most English speakers don't use it consciously. So when French requires the subjunctive after dozens of triggers, English gives no intuition.

Why it's hard for English speakers: the trigger list looks arbitrary. Il faut que takes subjunctive. Il est probable que takes indicative. Bien que takes subjunctive. Parce que takes indicative. Penser que (affirmative) takes indicative; ne pas penser que (negative) takes subjunctive. From an English perspective, these distinctions feel random.

The underlying logic: the subjunctive marks things in the realm of desire, doubt, necessity, possibility — things that aren't asserted facts. Il faut que tu viennes (it's necessary that you come): you coming is desired, not factual. Bien que tu sois fatigué (even though you're tired): the bien que frames the tiredness as conceded, not asserted. Je ne pense pas qu'il vienne (I don't think he's coming): the doubt makes his coming non-factual.

This logic doesn't always cleanly predict the rule — French is also conservative about which triggers it grants subjunctive to — but it gives you a starting intuition. See subjunctive overview and doubt and uncertainty triggers.

Drills that work:

• Master the top five triggers first (see grammar priorities by frequency).
• Drill the irregular subjunctive stems separately (aller → aille, faire → fasse, etc.).
• Pay special attention to the negated-belief reversal: je pense que (indicative) flips to je ne pense pas que (subjunctive).
• Use avoidance strategies for the cases where natives skip the subjunctive entirely.

Roadblock 3: Pronoun position (proclisis)

In English, object pronouns go after the verb: I see him. I gave it to her. I'm going to do it. In French, object pronouns go before the verb: Je le vois. Je le lui ai donné. Je vais le faire. This is called proclisis, and it produces some of the most stubborn errors English speakers make.

Why it's hard for English speakers: every English speaker spent decades placing pronouns after verbs. Reversing this is muscle memory work. Worse, French stacks multiple pronouns: Je le lui en ai donné (I gave some of it to him). Worse still, the order of stacked pronouns is fixed and non-obvious.

Drills that work:

• Start with single object pronouns: je le vois, je la vois, je les vois.
• Move to indirect: je lui parle, je leur parle.
• Then to combinations: see the clitic order page.
• Special attention to imperatives, where the order is different in the affirmative (donne-le-moi) versus negative (ne me le donne pas). This is one of the trickiest small features of French; see also imperative pronoun position.

Roadblock 4: Auxiliary choice (être vs avoir)

English uses have for every perfect: I have eaten, I have gone, I have arrived. French uses avoir for most verbs but être for about fifteen verbs of movement/change of state and for all pronominal verbs.

Why it's hard for English speakers: there's no English parallel. You have to memorize which verbs take être. The list itself is small, but the consequences are heavy — wrong auxiliary makes the whole sentence sound wrong.

The honest truth: there's no shortcut. The classic mnemonic is "MRS VANDERTRAMP" (Monter, Rester, Sortir, Venir, Aller, Naître, Devenir, Entrer, Retourner, Tomber, Rentrer, Arriver, Mourir, Partir), but most learners find that just memorizing the verbs as a list (or by exposure) works better. See auxiliary choice rules, auxiliary overview, and the auxiliary confusion errors.

Extra wrinkles:

• All pronominal verbs take être: je me suis lavé.
• A few verbs (descendre, monter, sortir, passer) take être when intransitive, avoir when transitive: je suis sorti (I went out) vs j'ai sorti le chien (I took the dog out).
• With être, the past participle agrees with the subject: elle est partie, ils sont partis.

Roadblock 5: Si vs quand and the tenses they take

After si (if), French takes the present for present/future hypotheticals: Si tu viens demain, on mange ensemble. Never a future tense after si.

After quand (when) referring to future, French takes the future tense: Quand tu viendras, on mangera ensemble. This is the opposite of English, where both if and when take the present.

Why it's hard for English speakers: English says "If you come tomorrow" and "When you come tomorrow" — both with the present tense. French splits them. After si the present is used; after quand the future is used. This is one of the most consistent English-speaker errors at every level.

See si-clauses, si + present, not future, quand with future, futur simple uses, and temporal clauses with future.

There's a related second-order error: in counterfactual si-clauses, English uses would in both halves of "If I would have known, I would have come" (in some dialects), but French strictly forbids the conditional after si. See si with conditional.

Roadblock 6: Depuis vs il y a

Both translate roughly to English "ago" or "for", but they're not interchangeable.

• Depuis
  • duration = for ici depuis trois ans.* (I've been living here for three years — and still am.)
• Il y a
  • duration = [this long] ago: Je suis arrivé il y a trois ans. (I arrived three years ago.)

Why it's hard for English speakers: English uses "for" in both cases with different tenses (I've been living here for three years vs I lived here for three years). French uses different prepositions and (crucially) different tenses.

Even harder: depuis takes the present tense in French to describe an ongoing situation, where English uses the perfect. J'habite (present), I have been living (perfect).

See depuis tense confusion, pendant, depuis, il y a, pour, and the choosing guide.

Roadblock 7: The clitic y and en

Two pronouns with no English equivalent. Y replaces à + noun (or a location); en replaces de + noun (or a partitive). Both are obligatory in many contexts where English just drops the object.

Why it's hard for English speakers: English freely drops pronouns when the antecedent is clear: "I want some." "I'm going there." French requires the clitic: J'en veux. J'y vais. English speakers consistently omit them and produce sentences that sound off without being grammatically broken.

See y overview, en overview, and y + en combined.

How to attack the roadblocks

These seven aren't equally hard for everyone. Diagnose yourself first: record a five-minute conversation and listen back. Which roadblocks are you hitting? Drill those first.

A reasonable rhythm: one roadblock per week. Read the dedicated grammar page, produce 50 example sentences (out loud, with self-correction), and ambush yourself in your next three conversations. After two months you'll have cycled through all seven and your French will sound dramatically less foreign.

A note on what isn't on this list

You may notice some famously hard French topics aren't here: the passé simple, the imparfait du subjonctif, the full subjunctive trigger list, the agreement of past participles with preceding direct objects in pronominal verbs. These are hard, but they're not common roadblocks, because either (a) they're rare in everyday French (passé simple), or (b) English speakers don't get them wrong in a characteristic way — everyone gets them wrong roughly equally. The seven on this list are the ones where English specifically gives you bad intuition. Those are the ones to attack first.

See the full errors reference for the broader inventory of common French mistakes.