Common French mistakes for Spanish speakers: agreement and determiners lead

In 2021, a study in Anales de Filología Francesa sorted 902 errors collected from 120 pieces of writing by Spanish-speaking students at A2 to B1 level. Fourteen categories account for 90 % of them. Missing agreement comes first at 16.29 %, and determiners, forms and uses combined, carry more than 19 %.

Why are the mistakes of Spanish speakers so predictable?

Spanish and French share a large part of their vocabulary and a very similar sentence frame. That is why a Spanish speaker reaches A2 faster than average. It is also why certain mistakes settle in for years: when a Spanish structure almost transfers, the error does not announce itself to the ear, and nothing stops it.

Marc Viémon measured that "almost". In Anales de Filología Francesa, in 2021, he sorts the 902 errors found in 120 pieces of writing by Spanish university students into fourteen categories that account for 90 % of the total.

A master's dissertation from the University of La Laguna finds the same families by another route, twenty sentences given to around fifty learners to translate: verb construction, adverb placement, relative pronouns, missing partitive article. We ran the same exercise for the mistakes of Arabic speakers, whose profile is very different.

Which error comes first, and why does agreement resist?

Missing agreement is the largest category, with 147 occurrences: gender accounts for almost half of them (73 cases), number and verb person for a quarter each, the past participle for six cases.

The examples recorded: "Une conversation très interesant", "Une jeune couple", "La lit", "Un erreur".

The paradox is that Spanish has gender and agreement. The difficulty is that words do not carry the same gender in the two languages. "Una pareja" is feminine, "un couple" masculine; "la cama" feminine, "le lit" masculine; "el error" masculine, "une erreur" feminine. Every word is a separate bet, and Spanish supplies a wrong answer with total confidence. Our article on the gender of French nouns gives the endings that help, and the one on past participle agreement covers the rest.

There is a further reason, which Viémon highlights, and it changes how you should work: many of these errors come not from ignorance of the rule but from imprecise pronunciation and loose reading. French agreement is very often silent, and someone who does not hear the difference between "intéressant" and "intéressante" has no way of checking their own sentence. That is why work on pronunciation brings down errors that look purely grammatical.

Why do determiners hold a fifth of all errors?

Two categories concern the determiner: its syntax (124 errors, 13.74 %) and its morphology (48 errors, 5.32 %). Together, 172 errors, over 19 % of the corpus, more than agreement.

The heart of the problem is the partitive article, which Spanish does not have:

• "Les jeunes écoutent musique", modelled on "escuchan música"
• "Le jeune couple avait problèmes", modelled on "tenía problemas"
• "Beaucoup des gens", instead of "beaucoup de gens"

On the morphology side, two more traps. The French possessive agrees with the thing owned, not the owner, hence "se ressemblent à ses parents" instead of "à leurs parents". And elision, 26 errors on its own, cannot be guessed: "mon amie" and not "ma amie", "l'homosexualité" and not "la homosexualité", "qu'elle" and not "que elle".

Which errors come straight from the Spanish sentence?

Subject omission comes first, with 26 errors: Spanish does without the subject pronoun, French never does, hence "Est étrange parler trois langues différents".

Then the pair "c'est" and "il est", 43 errors, 4.76 %. Spanish has a single "es" where French chooses between two constructions, hence "Mon père a 43 ans. C'est honnête et humble". The Language Portal of Canada states the rule in one sentence: use the impersonal "il est" when the complement works as an adjective, and "c'est" in every other case. Hence "il est bon d'avoir de l'ordre" against "c'est la règle d'agir ainsi".

Relatives and word order. Eighteen errors confuse "qui" and "que", since Spanish "que" covers both: "C'est une chose que, pour nous, est normale". Thirty-nine move the adverb the Spanish way: "J'ai pensé qu'il vraiment t'aime". Seventy-one involve a preposition the verb does not govern, as in "circulaient sur une rue".

What Spanish gives for free, and what these figures do not say

If English is your first language, the picture shifts in an instructive way. English has no grammatical gender at all, so the category that costs a Spanish speaker 16 % is not a redistribution for you but a new system to build. On the other hand English says "I like music" with no article, exactly where French demands one, so the determiner family hits you just as hard, and for the same reason. English never drops the subject, so that whole family disappears for you.

The balance is not bleak for a Spanish speaker. Spanish supplies a living subjunctive, used spontaneously, where most learners have to acquire a whole mood; the contrast between the perfecto and the imperfecto, which largely covers the French passé composé and imparfait; and gender, however badly distributed. A Spanish speaker argues about a distribution, they do not discover a category.

Now for what the figures do not say. Viémon's corpus is written and limited to 120 pieces from a single university: it describes tendencies, not a universal frequency. The percentages apply to the total of errors, not to the number of students: a category at 16 % is not a mistake that 16 % of learners make. If you come across a percentage presented as valid everywhere, ask for the source.

One encouraging finding remains. In Synergies Espagne, María Luisa Fernández-Echevarría followed 48 pieces of writing by B1 and B2 students at the Complutense University of Madrid and shows that these interferences, once made visible, correct themselves to a large extent. That matches Viémon: if the error belongs to the ear rather than to the rule, one more grammar lesson will not remove it. Hearing yourself and being corrected on the spot will.

That is what a live class adds. At Frenchee, the teachers are qualified native speakers, classes are held by video, one to one or in a small group of three to five students, with no subscription, and someone hears "un erreur" the moment you say it. To find your starting point, begin with the level test.

Sources

• Marc Viémon, "Les erreurs fréquentes des étudiants universitaires hispanophones de FLE à l'écrit", Anales de Filología Francesa 29, 2021
• Ibrahima Tine, interlanguage errors of Spanish-speaking learners of French, University of La Laguna
• María Luisa Fernández-Echevarría, "Médiation et autocorrection des interférences phonologiques", Synergies Espagne 11, 2018
• Language Portal of Canada, Clés de la rédaction, "c'est/il est"