difficulties of learning and using french compound words

learning vocabulary constitutes a crucial step in language learning. amongst different word categories, compound words have failed to attract the attention they deserve. this led us to conduct a study trying to pinpoint the difficulties learning these words and to suggest some techniques facilitating their acquisition. to that effect, a questionnaire as well as a vocabu-lary test were given to two groups of ffl (french as a foreign language) learners. carried out from a descriptive and analytical point of view, this study was based on a real corpus and led to the following results: firstly, learners showed little tendency towards making use of compound words, both in writing and in speaking. secondly, teachers can contribute to a better learning by providing learners with convenient strategies. thirdly, familiarity with greco-latin roots enormously help learners to guess the meaning of an unknown word.