alt Hacker NewsAs a native (Québécois) French speaker who's been living in the US for most of my adult life, something I miss from French is that once you've learned the (many) rules, you can be pretty confident about how to pronounce a given word.
English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native speaker, until I "leak" by tripping on one of those.
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The other way – trying to spell a word you hear – is harder, since many sounds have multiple possible spellings. Hence la dictée.
Like, "passage" and "massage", why do they not rhyme in English? They're both borrowed French words! And don't even start me on how English pronounce "hangar"... that's like, what if you tried to pronounce this word as differently from the original as possible while still plausibly having the same spelling.
I'm a native English speaker who became fluent in (québecois) french as an adult, I could not agree more. I have a better chance knowing how to pronounce a new word in french vs. English.
Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read".
Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like betterave "bet-rav" caught me off guard or gruau "gree-au".
French and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this.
Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
Source: native French speaker and professional translator.
> English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first.
English is not really one language in a sense given that it uses words from some many others. Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, etc.
I’m learning Japanese, which is overall a difficult language for a native English speaker to learn. However, the rules for pronunciation are comparatively a big relief, as is hiragana/katakana
The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers.
And the least phonetically consistent is English.
With the exception of some annoying ones like "fils" (son or sons) and "fils" (threads).
Native English speaker, but yes this is something I love about Spanish. There are rules to learn (sometimes quite variable depending on Mexico vs. Spain, etc) but once you learn them, pronunciation is usually pretty confident.
Though one downside which I've gleaned from friends who are non-native English speakers, is that the variance in pronunciation in English does sometimes lead to native English understanding what you meant, whereas in Spanish if you're pronouncing it wrong the listener often has no idea what you're trying to say. That's heavy anecdata though. I'd be super interested to hear from others if that's been their experience or not.