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As a German, I always found French to be incredibly regular. At least in the sense that from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation. The other way around i
by wongarsu 13d ago
As a German, I always found French to be incredibly regular. At least in the sense that from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation. The other way around is trickier. At least compared to German, which tries to strike a balance between the two directions. Compared to English, French is still pretty reasonable on that front too
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
- williamdclt 13d ago> from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit"). Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?). Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
- Miraltar 13d agomultiple people counting would be "comptent" A good example is "fils" which can mean "son" or "strings"
- poulpy123 13d agoI'm going to send your comment to a German friend who tries to speak french