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French spelling is fairly regular though, isn't it? My understanding is that each phoneme gets spelled in its own way, and the rules are fairly consistent. Once
by MrJohz 1y ago
French spelling is fairly regular though, isn't it? My understanding is that each phoneme gets spelled in its own way, and the rules are fairly consistent. Once you've learned them, you can typically read most French words aloud, and even guess at spellings of words.
In contrast, in English, pronunciation and orthography have drifted apart significantly more, which means that while there are rules to how any given phoneme might be written, there are a lot more possibilities for most phonemes, and there's a lot more overlap in terms of the spellings. All this means that it's usually much harder to correctly read aloud an English text containing words you don't know.
This is what makes spelling so difficult in English: it usually has more to do with a word's etymology than how it sounds.
- samus 1y agoPronunciation rules for French might be quite consistent, but there are usually multiple ways to spell a given word. Which one is correct has sometimes changed over time. And in the case of homophones, different spelling variations are the only way to be distinguish them in the written language.
- Agingcoder 1y agoNo, French is highly irregular. Reading it is easier than English but writing it is very difficult because it’s irregular. A typical 13-14 year old cannot write a full page of French without making lots of mistakes ( source : my kids’ teachers in France , and my fellow pupils at school in France when I was growing up). Just to give you a very simple example, the following words vin ( wine ), vingt ( twenty ), vain ( vain ) are pronounced exactly the same. And there are other variants for the same sound ( some kind of nasal i) spelled ein, or un. You can figure out how to read it up to a point, but writing it is very difficult.
- cafard 1y agoIn an ESL class I was teaching, a student (Congolese) suggested a dictée exercise. That such an exercise exists suggests to me that French orthography isn't wholly regular.
- Agingcoder 1y agoPrecisely ! The dictée is a typical exercise which exists only because the language is irregular. Most people in France dread this particular exercise, since you can’t win - points get deducted for every mistake, most people will make at least one, and if you make enough mistakes you get 0 points whether you made 5 or 500 mistakes.
- MrJohz 1y agoDictations exist in German as well, and German is very regular. In fact, the German primary school teachers I know do far more dictations with their classes than I ever did growing up in England.