Is it just me or is French grammar outrageously complicated. I cannot stand the different verb conjugations, etc. Why can't it just be like Chinese and have 1 word for all tenses, etc.

Does anyone know if German has a lot of conjugations like French does?

Raoul76, how long did it take you to become fluent in French and German and how did you do it? Was German grammer of same difficulty as French?

Vladimir, I can't say I'm fluent in either.  I can read them fluidly.  I began learning both in my late teens or early twenties, can't remember when.  

At first my German was better.  My "first love" -- remember that I wasn't Catholic -- was an East German girl, so I spent time in Berlin, and had exposure to the language.  But I've never been to France.  

The problem was I never studied German formally, and in fact, embarrassingly, never opened a grammar book during my entire twenties.  Until recently I didn't even know it had a dative case, nominative, accusative, genitive like in Latin ( no ablative though, and the rules are WAY simpler ).  I was just hoping to pick it up naturally, like you would with your native language.  Well, it never happened, but I did pick up a good vocabulary.  I have only recently begun getting into the grammar  and it will probably take me a year or so to be semi-fluent.  But the vocabulary is there, which is a great deal of the work involved.

With French, it was the same, I never studied grammar.  Basically up until a year or so ago I could read it, but not really speak it or even understand it.  But perhaps in a burst of inspiration, I spent most of the last year studying French, determined to speak it as well as Bossuet, ha ha.  I probably read and listen to French at least five hours a day, probably sometimes much longer.  That is really all I do.  I have gone from understanding maybe 15% of what is said in a video to 90%, and I can understand pretty much everything if I rewind and play certain things back ( I'm still at the point where they speak a bit fast for me, but it's getting better ).  Where there's a will there's a way.  

But mainly, God taught me patience.  This is what I can't stress enough -- start with the grammar, no matter how boring it is.  Ultimately, you will be making it infinitely easier on yourself.  Do not try to figure things out based on "feel," you won't be able to.

The verbs are fairly hard in French, but as you probably know, some of the tenses only turn up in formal literature and not in conversation.  German verbs are easier if you overlook that they all sound the same and so many start with "ver" or "an" or "auf" or "aus" or "vor."  

I don't agree with the conventional wisdom that French is easier than German, frankly.  I picked up a good amount of German much faster.  I guess it depends what kind of brain you have.  German is slightly more like English, the rhythm of it, it's not a Romance language.  With French, what bugs me is that a lot of words sound like English words but have different meanings.  They call them "faux amis."  There are also idiomatic differences that are frustrating.  Like we say "Thank you FOR" such-and-such, but they say "Merci DE" such-and-such, not "Merci POUR."  

There are lots of examples of such things.  If you try to mentally translate out of English, it doesn't work, you have to learn to speak idiomatically, which basically means to think in French.

There are three areas I'd concentrate on with French right away:

( a ) Pronunciation.  Master this first.  For a long while, I pronounced many things wrong and it is hard to unlearn.

( b ) Accord du participe passe, COD and COI -- According the past participle.  Complement d'object direct, or complement of the direct object, and complement d'object indirect, or complement of the indirect object.

This is a major part of French composition and I had no idea about it until I began studying grammar.  The past participle is mainly used after the verbs "avoir" or "etre" in the past tense, like "baiser" ( kiss ) in "Elle m'a baise sur la joue," she kissed me on the cheek ( sorry, too lazy to do accents now on this laptop. )  But sometimes, depending on the gender and number of the COD, you will have to change the past participle, for instance "Sa grand-mere, elle l'a baisee sur la joue."  This means "She kissed her grandmother on the cheek."  Here the past participle of the verb "baiser" has an extra "e," it is made feminine, because the COD is "grand-mere," or grandmother, and it appears before the verb... So you have to make it "accord" with the female COD.  This is the accord of the past participle.

You will have to read about it from a grammar site, it's easier than it sounds.  It just takes some time.  It is extremely hard for me to do this on the fly, but luckily, you don't really have to, because the past participle can't be heard, only seen in print.

( c ) The articles de and du and de la and des... Probably the most aggravating part of French.  You just have to learn the grammar, and even then it will take time to really pick it up.
 There are rules about when to use "de" vs. "des," but they don't always make sense to English speakers.  You're supposed to use "des" or "de la" to translate "of the" something.  Like " Je suis le maitre de la maison," I'm the master OF THE house.  But there are times when a direct English translation doesn't work.  Like the French say "de l'argent," which for us would translate "of the money," but we just say "of money."  So in French you'd say "Il y a un manque de l'argent," a literal translation of which would be "There's a lack of the money," but we don't use the definite article "the" in such cases, we just say "There's a lack of money."
 
French is a language that is easier to learn than German, but harder to speak well -- that's my theory.  It's sort of like what pianists say about Mozart, it's not hard to play, just hard to play well.  I can hear when many foreigners speak French and it makes me cringe.  With German, for some reason, it doesn't matter so much if it's garbled, it comes off as more cute.  But garbled French is heinous, not cute at all.  Either speak it well or don't speak it at all!  That's why French people will cut you off if you try to show off your smattering of French and they will redirect the conversation into English.

Not claiming any certain knowledge -- and it was a long time ago that I studied French -- but this business of the accord of the past participle sounds like modern mass culture French to me.  I think they do this in Italian, now, too; and I strongly suspect it's bogus.  (Have a very old Italian grammar treatise that was given to me and will attempt to check out.)

I clearly remember that I learned that it was ONLY with verbs conjugated with etre (still don't know how to get accents in e-mails or messages), that the past participle had to reflect the gender and number of the subject.

I believe I realized, those many years ago when I studied French, that not all instructors, be they native speakers or not, necessarily speak the most literate, correct French.  An example being, the use of the subjunctive mood with the conditional, in a sentence such as "If I were rich, I would . . ."

However, that is true in other languages as well, such as our own.  So anyone who considers it stuffy and narrow-minded to talk about 'good' and 'bad' English, French, whatever --just ignore this contribution.