French is geographically widespread with native speakers in Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. Because of France and Belgium's influence on the world through centuries of conquest and colonization, 175 million people in 54 countries speak French as their first or second language. It is the third most spoken language in the European Union after English and German and the national language of 24 countries around the world. French is an official language for all United Nation agencies as well as many international organizations. Due to its pervasiveness there is no shortage of resources for anyone wishing to learn to read in French.
The first step for anyone learning to read in French is to familiarize themselves with the alphabet. English speakers are in luck here - because of their roots in Latin, both English and French have the same alphabet with the standard 26 characters running from A to Z. Despite superficial similarities, there are some major differences that should be taken into account when studying the French alphabet. For one, the vowel system in French is different than in English. French vowels are divided into single vowels and vowel groups (two or more vowels combined such as 'ai', 'au' and 'ou' and so on). There are many rules on how to pronounce French vowels and consonants, but those whose emphasis is to learn to read in French should pay more attention to grammar and vocabulary. Punctuation in French is almost the same as in English, with a few minor quirks. The French sentence structure is similar to its English counterpart, with each sentence having a subject (un sujet) and predicate (un prédicat). As bizarre as it may seem to the native English speaker, all nouns in French have a particular gender – for example, a pen is 'masculine' while an apple is 'feminine'. It is interesting to note that English is actually the odd man out in this respect, as many languages around the world employ similar grammatical gender rules.
Without going into much more detail it is obvious that learning to read in French is not an impossible task for anyone with even a little knowledge of English. With the worldwide ubiquity of the French language there is no shortage of resources, offline or online, for learning French. Any well stocked public library or bookstore will have plenty of books on learning French.
