The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center has established the following classification of languages according to their level of difficulty for English-speaking learners to reach a high level of speaking proficiency; the lower the category, the easier for English-speakers to master:

--Category I level of difficulty: French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

--Category II level of difficulty: German, Dutch, English

--Category III level of difficulty: Greek, Hebrew, Moro, Persian-Farsi, Persian-Afghan, Pushtu-Afghan, Russian, Serbian/Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.

--Category IV level of difficulty: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

FRENCH (and the other Romance languages) requires approximately 720 hours of instruction to enable a learner to reach an advanced level of speaking proficiency. By contrast, it requires approximately 1000 hours of instruction to reach a low level of speaking proficiency in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.

--Therefore, it is more likely that American students will reach communicative, linguistic proficiency in Category l or II languages within the academic time period of grades 7-12 (approximately 857 hours of 40-minute instruction over 180 days for 5 years of study). The study of Category lll or lV languages for the same time period would lead to minimal linguistic proficiency at best.

It is estimated that someone who has never studied French already knows approximately 15,000 words and expressions in the language. This is due to the fact that the Duke of Normandy, William the Conquerer, landed in England in 1066 and became king after defeating the Saxons. The Anglo-Norman dynasty, followed by the French House of Plantagenets (Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lion-Hearted), reigned over England for centuries and approximately 10,000 French words were incorporated into English.

French provides the base for more than 35% of modern English vocabulary.