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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
by strongpigeon 7mo ago
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 7mo agoNative 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoYep, 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 7mo agoExactly! 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.
- Muromec 7mo agoAt 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.
- rkomorn 7mo agoI'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.
- abrowne 7mo agoThe other way – trying to spell a word you hear – is harder, since many sounds have multiple possible spellings. Hence la dictée.
- isolli 7mo agoWhile 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
- skydhash 7mo agoThe first one (un) is different from the others.
- isolli 7mo agoSo I've been told... but I could never hear the difference myself!
- skydhash 7mo agoThe 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.
- strongpigeon 7mo ago> 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.
- l-p 7mo agoThis 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%A7ais#Changements_historiques https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Prononciation/fran%C3%...
- amelius 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- agluszak 7mo agoIt's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)
- Koshkin 7mo agoTo 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 7mo ago> not about pronunciation > about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken. That concept is called pronunciation.
- Koshkin 7mo agoNot 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 7mo agothis is my personal favorite: https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
- calfuris 7mo ago"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!
- Joker_vD 7mo agoLike, "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 7mo agoFor 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.
- rkomorn 7mo agoWith the exception of some annoying ones like "fils" (son or sons) and "fils" (threads).
- kalenx 7mo agoOr "est" (he is) and "est" (the East) although English also has plenty of such "non-homophonic homographs"...
- yakkomajuri 7mo agoThe 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.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7mo agoSpanish 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoSure; this has nothing to do with the way written words are spoken, though.
- School-Cotton 7mo agoSpanish 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.
- Koshkin 7mo ago
- loufe 7mo agoI'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".
- pixelhaus 7mo agoGruau 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.
- nuancebydefault 7mo agoThe most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.
- throw0101a 7mo ago> 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.
- moribvndvs 7mo agoI’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 7mo agoUntil 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???
- davidivadavid 7mo agoFrench and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this. Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth Source: native French speaker and professional translator.