French language: ".. .. retirer de l'argent . " . . Is there a reason why prendre is not used.?

Not really although if you say: "je vais à la banque pour prendre de l'argent" it may be understood as you intend to steal the money! ;-) Retirer is what we would say in French and that's how languages work; a bit different! ;-)

Years ago I was teaching French, my mother tongue, in Norway, my adoptive country. Sometimes people would ask me: how do you say this or that in French? I then had to forget the language, get an image of the question and rephrase it in French. Because, in some case, we simply don't say exactly this or that, in French! ;-)

For the fun, here is a Norglish (English from direct Norwegian translation) sentence: "I am ugly afraid that you take it wrong. I speak floating English. Are you clear over that?"

... and then, the three Scandinavian languages are very close to the Anglo-Saxon making most of the modern English. It would even be worse from French. ;-)

Most languages are more precise in their use of words, thus it seems natural for French to use "retirer" - "remove" or "extract" - when taking of talking money from a bank account.

In English we can use words such as "give", take", "get", "do" for many different actions, but such general words are less common in other languages.

"Retirer" = "take out"; "prendre" = "take"

"Take out" and "take" have quite different meanings, hence they have different words in French.

In English we can make lots of new meanings by adding words like "out", "in", etc. to a few basic verbs. These two-word verbs are called phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs are a big thing in English but not in French, which tends to use distinct single words to express concepts for which phrasal verbs exist in English.

e.g.

put: mettre

put out (a candle): éteindre

look: regarder

look up (in a dictionary): chercher

These are things you just need to learn, although a helpful thing to bear in mind is that even in English many phrasal verbs have one-word synonyms that are often either parallel to or basically the same as the French.

E.g.

Parallel words:

Take out = withdraw

with- (as a prefix) = towards oneself, away from the other person (as in "withhold") = French "re-";

draw = pull = French "tirer"

Same word in French and English:

put out = extinguish = éteindre

leave out = omit = omettre

look up to = respect = respecter