In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconst

In French, if you see the written word you can deduce with a few simple rules how it is pronouced. However, information is lost on the way, it's hard to reconstruct how the word is written based on the sound (and there are many homophones where this is just impossible). In English there is not such deterministic way of simply deducing how a word is pronounced based on how it's written. In fact there are many heteronyms. You have a tear in your trousers but a tear in your eye. http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html http://www.madore.org/~david/misc/english-pronunciation.html