If you're just starting to learn French, you might find it interesting to learn some basics about French linguistics and grammar.

French is a Romance language, although that's not why it's called the language of love. In linguistic terms, "Romance" and "romantic" have nothing to do with love; they come from the word Roman and simply mean "from Latin."

The complete language family classification of French is as follows:

Indo-European --> Italic --> Romance

Indo-European is the largest language family in the world. It includes most of the languages of Europe, the Americas, and Asia, with such varied languages as Latin, Greek, Russian, Persian, and Sanskrit.

Italic essentially refers to Latin.

Romance languages originally evolved in Western Europe, but colonialism help to spread some of them all over the world. Where is French spoken?

  
Basic French Linguistics

Alphabet

French has the same 26-letter alphabet as English, although the importance of each letter varies. French also has 5 different accents:

acute	é
grave	à, è, ù
circumflex	â, ê, î
umlaut	ä, ë, ï
cedilla	ç

  
Gender

French has two genders: all nouns are either masculine or feminine.

  
Subject Pronouns

Many of the Romance languages, including Spanish and Italian, are "pro-drop," meaning that the subject pronoun can be dropped because the verb conjugation is different for each grammatical person. In other words, if a Spanish speaker says "Voy al mercado," everyone knows that s/he means "I am going to the store." In contrast, French is not a pro-drop language - subject pronouns are always required for all verb forms except the imperative.
  

Verbs

French verbs are categorized by their endings: -ER, -IR, and -RE. Each of these categories can be further broken down into regular, irregular, impersonal, and reflexive verbs.

There are 11 main verb forms:

Simple verb forms
Present	je vais
Imperfect	j'allais
Future	j'irai
Conditional	j'irais
Subjunctive	que j'aille
Imperative	va !
Compound verb forms
Passé composé	je suis allé
Pluperfect	j'étais allé
Future perfect	je serai allé
Conditional perfect	je serais allé
Past subjunctive	que je sois allé

Compound verb forms are conjugated with one of two helping verbs. Most verbs take avoir. The ones that take être are reflexive verbs and a handful of intransitive verbs of movement - learn more.
  

French and English

French is a Romance language with Germanic influence, while English is a German language with Latin and French influence. Thus French and English have a lot in common, notably large numbers of cognates. On the other hand, since they are different languages, there are a number of differences between French and English.

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