I've been thinking about the French language a bit recently and I've come to the conclusion that if I'd analyse it using engineering logic the French language would be less useful than German would be.
Let me elaborate. First of all, here's my statement: When switching from French to German, you gain somewhere around 1dB comparing signal to noise ratios (SNR).
My apologies to all you non-engineers. I will try and explain everything in a comprehensible way, however it's not always that easy as I will be using engineering logic to prove my statement.
To understand the statement, imagine talking to someone with loads of background noise, e.g. using a bad phone line or in a very loud environment. Imagine the noise level isn't so high that it actually hurts and for the sake of the argument never will. I will arbitrarily define the SNR to be equal to 0dB when to noise level is so high you can just about understand the other one. If a language is more suitable for this kind of situation, you might be able to increase the noise level a little bit (or decrease the voice level). If you can actually double the noise level when switching from one language to another, you have a gain of 3dB on your SNR (if you can increase it by a factor 10, you gain 10dB and so on - the scale is logarithmic). 1dB means you can increase the noise by about 25%, but of course all of this is very, very hypothetical and of course in no way accurate.
Short version: I think german speakers have less trouble understanding what they're saying. (Note: this only applies for spoken language, not for written language, unless you have to use an AZERTY keyboard to write it).
Of course, I prefer my mother tongue, so at first I thought I wasn't really in the position to write this and any French person would think it was the other way round. Now, I'm not so sure. Here's a couple of reasons I think I'm right:
Too many similarities - My favourite example here is marron (brown) and marrant (funny, as in 'hey, that's funny'). For the untrained ear, those two words are hardly distinguishable. Anyone who know's some French can hear the difference if they're said after another, but actually pronouncing them right is extremely difficult, at least for me. Doesn't matter (so I'm told) because the French use context to distinguish the two - which can be confusing. In this case, both words are adjectives, so they have the same position in the sentence. I's easy to think of examples ('Mr. Jones? Oh, he lives over there, it's the house with the funny door.').
Heavy reliance on proper pronounciation - Of couse, this is the most annoying for foreigners, but I've heard people with accents having similar problems. It's happened several times to me that I said a - grammatically - perfectly right sentence and the other end had no clue what I was talking about - bad pronounciation. It's hard to get right, because the difference between an accent and bad pronounciation is a lot smaller than in German (I think). This also goes for questions: In French, you can quite often make a question from a statement by increasing the pitch of your voice at the end of the sentence. Today, I left an office saying 'Ah bon, c'est tout' which must have been pretty close to 'C'est tout?' because the secretary said 'Oui, c'est tout'.
Big difference between pronounciation and written words - Yes, I know German has a big difference here too, every language has. German has an advantage, though: We usually pronounce every letter in the word, exceptions usually being non-German based. And we leave a gap between the words, making them easier to distinguish. When talking to foreigners in Germany, I'm used to questions like: 'What was that word?' whereas here, I'm more interested in the whole sentence, simply because I can't tell where one word started and the other stopped.
Bad use of redundance - In language, redundance is what let's you understand a sentence even if you missed out a couple of syllables. French has some redundancys which are not really necessary. It starts with their tenses. Everyone tells me passé simple is not really important, but of course it's used in books. Grammatically, it has the same meaning as the passé composé (but is not made using a modal and a participle, just in case your interested, but has it's own forms) and in some cases, I've heard people use it as a shortcut in spoken language (e.g. saying j'eus [I had] instead of j'ai eu. Now I see this written down, I think I might have been malinformed about this - if you mumble the second one, it sounds like the first one).
Another thing is the adaption of adjectives. If I'd use an AZERTY keyboard for too long, I'd have to say 'Je serai fou' (I'm getting crazy). Unless, of course, I'm a girl (check.... no, I'm not) in which case I'd have to say 'je serai folle'. This adds zero information to the sentence, in 99% of the cases I hopefully don't have to adapt the adjective to clarify my sex (that's why I've grown a beard).
Problems with new words - A good example of new words is family names. Here, everyone just spells out their last name automatically, because just by hearing the sound you usually have no clue on how to spell something.
I might add some more to this entry in the future, but right now I've got french class. Time to adapt the filter matching in my acoustic signal processing lobe.
[Update]
This kind of supports my analysis: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/79712/from/rss09
