Parent was actually referring to write as you speak, not reading. It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language w

Parent was actually referring to write as you speak, not reading. It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language writing conventions you can read the language just fine, but that's tautology. Roughly half of the letters written in French are not pronounced, either because they come too soon in the word, or because they are followed by another letter or because they are too late in the word. Unless the next word starts with specific letter, in that case you do pronounce the ending of the previous word. Sure, for a native speaker it could be very easy to read and write, and it might be determined by very consistent set of few dozen rules, but I would say that reading or writing French is anything but straightforward.