Why French is a smart second-language pick
The grammar syllabus is a closed list and the marking is kind. But only if your child avoids the two mistakes almost everyone makes.
18 Nov 2025
French or Hindi. The second-language question lands on our desk each June, usually from a parent who has already been given six opinions in the building WhatsApp group. We teach both, so we have no horse in this race. But we do have marksheets, and the marksheets say something specific: for a certain kind of student, French is the smarter pick from class 8 to 10 — in ICSE and CBSE alike.
The marks logic
Second-language French in class 9 and 10 is, at its core, a closed list. A fixed set of tenses. A fixed set of grammar structures. A handful of writing formats. Prepare the list properly and the paper holds no surprises, because the examiner can only ask what is on it.
Hindi is a richer subject, and that is exactly the problem for a purely marks-minded student. The paper carries literature, and literature marking is human. Poem appreciation, character sketches, bhavarth — two examiners can defensibly give the same answer different marks. Scoring 90 in Hindi means writing well enough to impress someone. Scoring 90 in French mostly means not making mistakes on material you have already seen. One of those is much easier to train.
To be plain about it: a child who loves Hindi and reads it comfortably should take Hindi, and will score. This post is for the child who is choosing on marks.
The two ways students ruin it
French has a reputation as a scoring subject, and every year students still manage to get 60s in it. It happens in exactly two ways.
Memorising without pronunciation. Students treat French as strings of silent letters to be photographed. It does not work. Vocabulary you cannot say, you cannot spell — the sound is what holds the word in memory. These students misspell the same verbs for two years, confuse endings that sound completely different aloud, and their dictation marks sink. Ten minutes of reading aloud, most days, fixes it. Almost nobody does it.
Ignoring the writing formats. The letter, the email, the short composition carry a heavy slice of the paper. Students drill grammar for months and then walk into the exam never having written one full letter under time. Grammar knowledge does not assemble itself into a composition on exam day. The formats have to be practised as formats, to correction, again and again.
What a good week looks like
- Two conjugation sessions of 20 minutes each, written out by hand. Not read. Written.
- One writing format a week — a letter or an email, done in under 20 minutes, handed to someone who will actually correct it.
- Ten sentences translated both directions, English to French and back. This exposes the gaps that fill-in-the-blank exercises hide.
- Ten minutes of reading aloud from the textbook, badly if necessary. The accent does not need to be Parisian. It needs to exist.
That is about two and a half hours a week. A class 9 student who holds this routine walks into class 10 with the grammar automatic and the formats familiar, and the board paper becomes what it should be — the easiest 90-plus on the marksheet.
One last thing, because parents ask: no, your child will not come out speaking fluent French. That is not what a second-language school syllabus does. They will come out with a strong scoring subject and a real base to build on later, which is more than most subjects can promise.