English vs. French for Foreign Students

I started learning English when I was in elementary school, at which time English for children was taught through songs, stories, and games. The joy of understanding a different language other than my own was beyond compare, which started to pique my interest in linguistics. High school came when I decided to challenge myself with a completely new foreign language, and my choice was French. Merely one semester into studying French, I found myself extremely lucky having chosen this language as it shared multiple similarities with English. However, even until today, my English and French learning journeys have never been exactly alike. After ten years of studying English and three years of studying French, I contend three main differences between learning these two languages. To start with, my experiences of studying English and French vocabulary differ from each other. English, a language with vocabulary immensely influenced by Latin words, is the first foreign tongue I have learned. Unfortunately, it shares little to no similarities with my mother tongue Vietnamese whose vocabulary is related more closely to Chinese. This striking difference is undoubtedly the most formidable obstacle for any Vietnamese student to overcome. Games and songs do help with the simple words like ‘cat’ or ‘dog’, but as I approach higher level, academic words such as ‘individualism’ or ‘homogeneous’ entail a lot more time and effort to study. Unlike English, French words come to me much more naturally. With my seven-year-old English word bank, French vocabulary has never been a daunting task because in contrast to the ice cold relationship of Vietnamese and English words, the link between French and English vocabulary is remarkably stronger as both are under heavy influences of Latin language. For example, ‘table’ in French literally is ‘table’ in English, or ‘important’ carries the exact same meaning in both languages. Another major difference I