[strongpigeon]

As 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.

[freedomben]

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.

[strongpigeon]

I would say I agree. That being said, my experience is biased from working in Big Tech where the accents are on such a wide spectrum that people have no choice but to develop a "flexible" ear.

[rkomorn]

I think you're right that working in certain areas (geographical or professional) gives you an ability to grasp all kinds of English.

I've worked in universities and in tech, in New Jersey, LA, and Silicon Valley, and I feel like I can understand just about anyone's English.

Ironically, the ones I have the hardest time understanding are almost always Brits.

[Joker_vD]

Yep, a common anecdote from European science conferences is that by the second day, everybody do settle into the thick, averaged Spanish/German/French/Italian/Russian accent of their English which is pretty much equally understandable to everyone present except from the actual guys from Oxford, England.

[orwin]

Exactly! When I have to speak with actual English people, I do try my best to imitate a Americanised, TV show accent. When I speak to non-native speaker, I don't try and let my french go through. It's easier for everyone.

[rkomorn]

I'm the other way around. I sound like a native US English speaker, but when I'm speaking English around French people who aren't as fluent, I "Frenchify" my accent so it's easier for them.

My spouse finds it amusing, which is probably the biggest benefit, TBH.

[Muromec]

At some point I started to embrace my rolling Rs, "ze" all the way and rhyming passage and massage. But luckily I live at the bottom of the sea, where everyone is an English speaker, but nobody is a native.

[abrowne]

The other way – trying to spell a word you hear – is harder, since many sounds have multiple possible spellings. Hence la dictée.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, this is my major difficulty with French, and it's even more difficult in colloquial spoken French which may drop entire syllables or words. I often find African pronunciations of French to be easier because they seem to pronounce each syllable distinctly.

[elric]

Having grown up in two languages where dictée is a thing, I was always bemused by spelling bees. You have to spell one word? And have loads of time to do so? Pah!

[rkomorn]

To be fair, spelling bees usually have more complicated words (though the complicated ones are often borrowed from French anyway so, win-win for some of us).

[isolli]

While helping my children learn French spelling, I was horrified when I realized that there are 6 or 7 ways to write the sound [ɛ̃]: un in (im) [i]en ain aim ein

[wat10000]

Gotta get it right or you'll order some wind instead of some wine. (Did that once, and that's how the difference finally stuck for me.)

[throwaway894345]

What did the server bring to your table? A fan?

[wat10000]

They understood what I meant, and then the French folks I was with had a long discussion with me about how it's not the same sound.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I've been there. Apparently my pronunciation of "Chretien" (Christian) was indecipherable, and the French people I was speaking with clarified it for me by saying, "you're saying cray-tee-uh(n), but it's pronounced cray-tee-uh(n)"

[skydhash]

The first one (un) is different from the others.

[isolli]

So I've been told... but I could never hear the difference myself!

[skydhash]

The first one is pronounced with an O shape with the mouth (like you would do with the word oh), and the others with more of a smile shape (like with the word see). It’s impossible to pronounce one like the other.

I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.

[l-p]

This has to be a regionalism because there're strictly identical to me, eg. in "Un train." /œ̃tʁɛ̃/ I say the two vowels exactly the same way.

After a cursory search it seems my Parisian-ish accent is at fault: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Prononciation/fran%C3%...

[strongpigeon]

> I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.

Why can't the Québécois count to four? Because there is a tree in the way.

[AStrangeMorrow]

Arguably so is “aim/ein etc” and “in”, though more dialect dependent and more subtle.

The former for me have a bit more exhale and round sound while the “in” are a tad drier.

For example “fin” and “faim” are distinct for me. However “faim” and “feint”

[Joker_vD]

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.

[icegreentea2]

For anyone wondering, passage and massage entered English at very different times. Passage entered in middle english (around 13th century), while massage entered in the 19th century.

[loufe]

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".

[nuancebydefault]

The most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.

[joak]

The famous ghoti as an alternate spelling for fish. Gh like in enough O like in women Ti like in nation

[dnemmers]

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti_Hook

[pixelhaus]

Gruau would be closer to grew-oh, if it helps.

There's the classic squirrel/écureuil situation where the French word is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, and the English word is hard for French-speakers.

Loving my bilingual spot of the world.

[amelius]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

[agluszak]

It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)

[calfuris]

"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation. Pull up a list of words that start with "gh": none of them (unless "ghoti" itself is on the list) start with an /f/ sound. You'll find the same for words ending in "ti" and the /ʃ/ sound.

I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!

[Koshkin]

To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.

[1718627440]

> not about pronunciation

> about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken.

That concept is called pronunciation.

[Koshkin]

Not exactly. Pronunciation varies between dialects and accents; it is the subject of a linguistic discipline called "phonology"; writing systems or difficulties arising from their "irregularities" with respect to spoken word do not concern it. Put differently, speech and pronunciation, while related, are not the same.

[Barrin92]

this is my personal favorite: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

[moribvndvs]

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

[sevenseacat]

Until you start learning kanji and then some of the readings of words are just completely irregular. Why is 明後日, the day after tomorrow, read as あさって???

[throw0101a]

> 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.

[davidivadavid]

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.

[rkomorn]

With the exception of some annoying ones like "fils" (son or sons) and "fils" (threads).

[kalenx]

Or "est" (he is) and "est" (the East) although English also has plenty of such "non-homophonic homographs"...

[yakkomajuri]

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.

[umanwizard]

> And the least phonetically consistent is English.

I guess maybe they're not "languages you know", so your statement is still accurate, but surely the Chinese languages and Japanese are even further than English on this spectrum. Some (but not all) Chinese characters encode how the character was pronounced in ancient Chinese, which might give a vague hint to how it's pronounced in modern Chinese languages, but that's about it. And Japanese is even worse: most Japanese words are written using Chinese characters, but the same character can have several different pronunciations (for example, the same character might have three pronunciations: one for a Chinese loanword, another for the same Chinese loanword that entered Japan in a different century, and a third for a native Japanese word whose pronunciation isn't connected to the Chinese pronunciation at all). Also, one character in Japanese can have a several syllable pronunciation, whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese at least, polysyllabic characters are extremely rare.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.*

Finnish (from what I've heard, as I don't speak it) is even more regular in the sense that this also works the other way around, i.e., if you hear a word, you can use rules to know how to spell it. This does not always hold in Spanish (e.g. B and V are pronounced the same, so you cannot know if you're hearing "vaca" or "baca" without resorting to context and common sense reasoning) although it does hold for all but a small bunch of grapheme pairs.

* Modulo regional variants, but if you focus in any given variant (e.g. Spanish from Spain) this holds.

[z500]

The only problem with that is the vast number of declensions. Sure they're not as wildly divergent as, say Latin or Ancient Greek, and there's no gender, but because of all the cases there's a lot of subtle variations to remember

[Koshkin]

Sure; this has nothing to do with the way written words are spoken, though.

[umanwizard]

Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.

[ivm]

México is because of the old orthography, before it was Don Quixote too.

[Koshkin]

You do not guess, you learn.

[throwaway894345]

I agree, and I've heard this property referred to by linguists as a "shallow orthography".

[Koshkin]

> a single way to pronounce it

Within a particular dialect, that is.

[jjav]

> 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.

It's even better than that, there is a single sound for each letter individually. Put together those sounds and that's how the word is deterministically pronounced, no guessing or learning (or even understanding) necessary.

[Koshkin]

Finnish is not unique in that it has quite a few dialects like most other languages.