French and English is switched.
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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French orthography is way more coherent than English. From the spelling you can pretty much tell how a french word is pronounced. Not the other way around, sure, but that's a damn sight better than English which manages neither.
I haven't had my coffee yet this morning. Read this and was like...
"Spanis" 👁👄👁
I'd put Finnish first. Every letter is there for a purpose and no tricks.
I'd have put it at the end.
Take it from the Serbs then. They have rule that states write as you say it and that means they even change the spelling of foreign words and such. Foreign names for people and towns are spelled as you would pronounce them. So New York is something like Njujork and Michael Jackson becomes Majkl Džekson or somethig similar.
I like the Serbian rule. It's not unnecessarily complicated.
They do that sometimes in Finnish, less now than before. At least that's what I read on faisbuk.
Meanwhile, Russian is 99% phonetic if you take the total of 5 hours to learn the Cyrillic alphabet (which by the way Duolingo was actually incredible at, just don't use duo for actually learning the language)
I learned to read Cyrillic from reading Wikipedia. I got obsessed with Russian history and Russian entries in Wikipedia have the English name alongside the Cyrillic spelling. So, I read the Russian words alongside the English spelling to help me how to read in Russian. I also thought I could try reading Greek since Cyrillic is based from it, but for some reason I am struggling. I think I can quickly learn to read letters based from the shape and the sound they represent but Greek letters are a bit more complicated for me.
I hate French like the next guy, but pronunciation rules are at least consistent compared to English. An English word's pronunciation is everyone's best guess. Sometimes depends on context or tense, even when written the exact same. With French you don't really have that. It's confusing, there are lots of letters, but at least it's consistent.
English suffers from adopting a lot of words from other languages. We got a mix of Germanic, French, a bit of Spanish and Italian, and for the US English, whatever butchery the Brits did/do. (See: The Great vowel shift and Soccer) You smash all those languages together and then let the Brits spend a few hundred years mangling everything and see what you get for rules.
Today English is still willing to file the serial numbers off of any cool sounds and claim as our own. So, Damn the Rules! It makes for interesting words.
But I still blame the French for no other reason than I can.
It also didn't help that English was standardizing its spelling as the Great Vowel Shift was occurring
English pronunciation depends on the language they stole the word from.
It also depends who you're talking to and/or where you are.
That part's not as well unique to English though.
Stolen from? The English got invaded by the Romans, Normans, Vikings etc. Didn't have much choice in that word adoption.
Oh, we steal words. And we will continue to steal words until we have them all!
The Celtics got invaded by the Romans, then by Saxons, then by Vikings/Danes, then by Normans in the 11 Century. Then they spent the last 900 years invading everybody else.
Ehh, Normans mostly kept to themselves. The folks didn't have to adopt any of their language, except to speak to the king and upper administration. But French language was perceived as fashionable, so the vocabulary crept into English — the division between crude everyday Norse/Germanic words and ‘elegant’ highbrow Norman words is still present in the choice of which ones were chosen to stay in the language for any particular topic.
I've spoken French my whole life. The only consistent thing I can think of versus English is the prononciaton of "c" or "g" with the succeeding vowel. Otherwise it's such a mess. "Eau" (water) has three vowels, but is pronounced like the one vowel that is not in it: "o". Almost all words have letters that aren't pronounced, but you can't tell from any rules. You just have to know how the word is pronounced and written.
English pronunciation and spelling is indeed also fairly inconsistent, but I still make a lot less spelling mistakes even though it's not my first language.
As someone who has also spoken French their entire life; I disagree. Is French orthography messy? Sure, but it's a consistent mess. Like the other commenter said, once you know "eau" is pronounced "o", you know. Un beau bateau sur l'eau.
Contrast with English, where rough & thorough thought is required throughout tough sentences such as this one just to figure out what the Fuck sound "gh" will make.
I really came to appreciate the difference in English and French when I used to work in pharmacies; my first job was in a French place, and I intuitively knew how to pronounce drug names at first encounter.
I later worked in a place with only Anglophones and I never got the prononciation on the first try. It was a guessing game.
Everywhere you see 'eau' or 'eaux' it's pronounced 'o'. Always, no exceptions. It's crazy you never noticed that once you know the pronunciation rules of French you can say every word correctly.
I learned French in school, but no one ever told me how modern French is a combination of divergent old French languages, "Langues D'oc" in the south where the word for yes was "oc" and "Langues d'oïl" where oui was the word for yes in the North.
From the former, we have L'Occitane, and the Languedoc region of the south of France.
I wonder what else i don't know about French. /me reads Wikipedia.
English pronunciation is much worse than just silent letters. It doesn't really make any sense and you need to learn tons of words by heart: https://fishofgold.net/2023/12/08/english-pronunciation-is-stupid/
Sometimes even the exact same set of letters are pronounced differently. The verb live vs a live broadcast. Read (present) vs read (past) and many more.... Are you kidding me?
French is actually quite regular with fewer exceptions to the rules of pronounciation.
People like to use french words like "Oiseau" (bird) as an example of why french pronounciation is bad but they just do not know the rules of it!
Take "Oiseau" for example "Oi" is usually pronounced [wa] like in "Oie" with a silent e, "Oise" or other words containing it. -seau is a typical suffix. So a french reader can easily know how to pronounce "oiseau" just from reading it. You just can't because you don't know the rules of French pronounciation!
English is so much worse with pronounciations that ignores spelling: Take the word "colonel" for example. What's worse is that in English there seemingly are no rules whatsoever with vocals being long or short depending on historical reasons and consonants appearing or disapering depending on whether Mercury is in retrograde.
I feel like we might as well just go back to symbol languages. What’s the point of an alphabet if the letters don’t actually convey consistent pronunciation? It’s just more confusing because the letters imply rules which don’t hold.
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Yes, I know some of those are technically pronounced differently, but the average English speaker can't tell.
But honestly, as someone who learned French as an adult, the biggest hurdle is knowing which combinations of letters make which sounds. Many are completely illogical - the 3rd person plural verb conjugations are particularly weird - but there is less inconsistentcy than English. The harder part is actually trying to get your English tongue to say words like "aéroport" or "heureux" or "accueillir" properly.
There are always some outliers, like "oeuf" (egg) being pronounced "uhf" while the plural "oeufs" being pronounced "oo", but you get used to those.
I think I'd write oeufs as "uhh" in quasiphonetinglish
French pronunciation works by geological principles: over the years, what looks like an intricate arrangement of vowels and consonants gets eroded and folded down to what’s essentially a nuanced grunt.
Sounds like Australian. Or strayn, as I would say to a fellow denizen of this beloved wonderhell.
I think you actually just described Danish.
Why pronounce a consonant when you just can swallow it and use a glottal stop instead?
"A g å a ø i a å" is a proper sentence where I come from.
It means: A goat on an island in a river.
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And when the letters are removed, French still lets you know there was a letter at some point by putting a little hat on top of the preceding letter. It makes learning it even funnier.
Forêt and forest. Arrêt and arrest. Hôpital and hospital.
As a native French speaker this may be the laziest part to me. We still say someone was hoSpitalisé, in a hôpital. People can be défeneStrés through fenêtres. Someone can be arrêté through arrestation.
Lots of hidden pains and treasures. When I was a kid I thought learning all this shit was pointless. We should just reform everything and spell like we speak. But then I also learned to appreciate the evolution of the language, and why it's aisle and isle in English.
We should just reform everything and spell like we speak.
Let me introduce you to slavic languages, where AFAIK it's the rule, not exception
Same for Estonian, which is why we need umlauts for letters that don't exist in many other languages' versions of the latin alphabet. But since we're special snowflakes, we also have õ, which is such an uncommon letter in the world that we have a border sign on our biggest island to signify where the language border exists: On the mainland and most places we use õ, but people on Saaremaa people will use ö instead because they're behind the times.
We also have ž and š but they're a bit less special, many european languages use them. Because how would you even know how to pronounce gelatine without writing it as želatiin?
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French: Every living thing is born without meaning, but non-living things have a gender
German: Dogs are male, cats are female, kids are middlesex. Your refrigerator is male.
Dogs are male, cats are female
There's no way to disprove that! Have you ever seen a cat penis?
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No, the WORDS have a gender because it makes things sound better.
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French: oui paid for the whole alphabet and by God oui're using the whole alphabet
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The French word for bird is oiseau, which contains every vowel and none of them are pronounced correctly.
Oi wah
S Z
Eau O
Sound correct to me.
Letters in words are never pronounced like they sound in the alphabet, they are pronounced in syllables like I am showing you here but you probably already know that and chose not to say it because its not against the French language.
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