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"Pronounce" by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
(www.smbc-comics.com)
Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
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Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
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French is still pretty consistent once you know the syllables. If you give me a word I don't know, I'll still be able to pronounce it correctly. You can't expect that with English.
Les poules couvent souvent au couvent.
Ok, it's true that verbs have different pronunciation rules. If you know that it is the verb, it's not an issue. But I admit that it can be tricky for new learners.
Yeah, everything’s easy once you’ve learned the exceptions!
So, heteronyms do exist, and there’s several hundreds of them. Yes, less prevalent than English, still though.
Now let’s turn around: homophones.
How do you spell [so]?
L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]? Is the author afraid of heights or authors? 🤔
Il y a plein d‘[o] [o] [o]. Good luck writing that down.
And let’s not go down the route of ambiguous verbs, where different verbs end up with the exact same conjugation, shall we. Rayions? Peignant? Moules (also plural of moule, lol)?
Oh, what about those accents? Say what you want about German Umlauts, but at least they’re consistent. Why does accent grave not change the pronunciation of a and u, but e? How do you know where to put an accent circonflexe?
Homophones don't impact the pronunciation though, which was the main subject of the top comment (the second part anyway). And I definitely agree that French is not easy for foreigners, especially regarding spelling. But pronunciation rules are much more consistent than in English.
To summarize, my point is that going from the spelling to the pronunciation is (much) easier in French than in English. The other way around (pronunciation -> spelling) is of course much harder in French, as you said, and the French school system shows that: we just have to look at how important the exercise of "La Dictée" is.
Small note to be finicky: "L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]?" is not an issue, since for "auteurs", you pronounce the "liaison" with "des", whereas you don't with "hauteurs". But I still get your point ;)
Well, the joke is about the relation between spoken and written English, so „how do you write [o]“ is just the same joke but in reverse 🤷♀️
And none of that touches my original point, i.e. that written french is syntactically different from spoken French.
Look, I have several German-French friends with whom I took French class in high-school. They grew up with two languages, their spoken French is flawless, they couldn’t write a single paragraph if their lives depended on it.
Loic Suberville's YouTube shorts on French vs English (and sometimes Spanish) are pretty entertaining to show that they're all difficult as a non-primary language. :)