Ugh, I'm triggered. The hardest part about learning French in school was these damn accents. I never quite got the rules and could not memorize the spellings, and so in my written tests I'd just randomly throw in some accent on some letter if I kinda remembered or, more often, guessed that one belonged in there somewhere.

This annoyed my French teacher, a native Parisian, no end. She'd get extremely frustrated and say something like "Can't you hear what you wrote?! You don't pronounce 'Noël' as 'Noél', that sounds ridiculous!" and for the life of me I could not hear the difference.

Yeah, my French grades weren't great. But I redeemed myself much later in life by having an extended spoken conversation, where misspellings matter much less, in French with a very patient Canadian listener.

Also I felt better to find out a lot of the differences in various French accents relate to how these vowels are pronounced. A funny anecdote I heard was from a Qubecios person who visited Paris and placed an order at a restaurant in French. The two waitresses stared at him for a couple of seconds, and then one of them leaned to the other and whispered, in French, "I think he's trying to speak French."