When I lived in Paris, I remember having a conversation with a young French woman who taught English in her local collège. We chatted about our mutual interest in language learning, and I put it to her that the vocabularies of English and French had much in common. She, rather reluctantly, agreed that there was common ground.

I went a step further, adding that “English grammar and French grammar is…” She finished my sentence for me: “Completely different!”.

“Not so”, I disagreed. “When you look closely, you see enormous parallel between the grammar of French & English…why does everyone think they’re so different ?!”

And so it is. We’ve been conditioned to think of English & French grammar as separate, never-shall-meet entities. For the poor language-learner, this perspective is dis-empowering. It says you have to re-learn a new grammar from scratch, you have to 're-wire your brain'.

But when you scratch the surface, you see how connected French & English grammar really is. And this empowers you, because you discover you’re already quite close to the new language you’re learning.

To give a simple analogy, that will please computer techies: both languages may look and sound different on the outside, but they use the same operating system.

In our next Tip, we start showing you how French and English grammar ‘operate’ the same way.