I had that "a-ha" moment not at first by learning that "fenêtre" means "window", but later when I learned the German word is "Fenster".

Native 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.

The other way – trying to spell a word you hear – is harder, since many sounds have multiple possible spellings. Hence la dictée.

Like, "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.

I'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".

French and English are roughly on par for how terrible they are at this.

Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth

Source: native French speaker and professional translator.

> 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.

I’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

The 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.

With the exception of some annoying ones like "fils" (son or sons) and "fils" (threads).

And ê, when pronounced (most of the cases) it's just a è.

ë, contrary as said in the article (full slop?) is the most complicated and with some exceptions. But there is so few words that use that letter that you just don't have to care.

Just pronounce ë as è when its in (inside) a word and not pronounced at all when it's at the end. The only exception I can think of is canoë (pronounced conoé), but everybody will understand if you say cano.

> That's it. That's how it should be explained.

That's contingent on your ability to imagine sounds doing ups and downs.

I'm a non-native French speaker, but I am pretty confident that's not true. They are actually different sounds, not just the same sound at a different pitch.

French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.

> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.

That is very far from the truth, and unhelpful. Yes, some people have accents, but it’s not because you cannot hear the difference (or at least claim you cannot) that it does not exist. Out of curiosity, how do you pronounce "il a fermé la fenêtre"?

For non-French people: there are accents in which é and è are most of the time very similar, particularly in the South. They are very proud of it somehow. I am all for regional accents, but claiming that your particular pronunciation is the one true way is ridiculous.

> one current top show in France with French people on it got french subtitles

One friend of mine once had to translate English-to-English in France. A French policeman or taxi driver or something knew English as a second language. My friend is from New Jersey and sounds like what I might call CNN English (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?). The other person he was with had a thick Alabama accent. The Frenchman could not understand what he said directly, but could understand it when repeated by the New Jerseyan.

> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.

No we don’t, wtf

é and è (as well as e but it goes without saying) are very clearly distinct sounds.

Les français de l'académie française just prove my point : so much ways to pronounce the same word that we don't care beside on internet, like for la raisintine... Getting the wrong é/è/ê/ë won't make you not understandable. e is indeed different

French person here: there absolutely is a difference, at least in the "heard on TV" accent.

Could you be talking about the southern accent where maybe those sound similar?

A pet theory of mine is that people confusing "est" (sounds like "è", means "[he/she/it] is") and "et" (sounds like "é", means "and") while writing grew up with an accent that does not make the distinction between those sounds. (I don't criticize the mistake or the accent but have always been curious about this precise kind of writing mistake because those two words sound so different to me)

Nice, thanks for sharing. Having been "accent shamed" in the past with Spanish*, I am a little terrified to try speaking foreign language in front of others. Hearing this makes me want to learn French (on top of plenty of other great reasons to learn it).

* In fairness, most (but not all) of it was probably light-hearted laughter, but I didn't understand that at the time so it left an unfortunate psychological imprint on me that is hard to shake and gives me anxiety even thinking about it

You pronounce "fête" as "féte" (basically, equivalent to the English "faith" without the "h" sound at the end)? To my hear these two sound very different.

Non. Personne ne prononce tous les accents de la même manière.

> no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.

Non.

That's patently false in my dialect at the very least...

But also true that we have some strong local accents, and that people no matter their level should feel encouraged to at least try to speak French. It's the best way to learn.

> French person here :

I could guess that solely from the space before ':'

Many Americans turn on subtitles when watching tv/movies

Gone are the days when American actors flaunted those crisply enunciated albeit preposterous "continental" accents

> French person here : no differences, we pronounce them all é and we don't care.

No we don't.

In the South the é sound is more common while in the North they tend to pronounce the è very 'correctly', but that does not apply to all words.

For instance the way someone pronounces "après". In the South it is quite common to pronounce it pretty much like if it was written "aprés". Same goes for "est", e.g. il est(é) vs il est(è).

That's how you recognise a Parisian in Marseille because they have an "accent pointu" ;)

Technically true, but this concept is foreign to English speakers. English relies heavily on diphthongs and can’t separate the sounds in their head. Simplest example is probably the word “no” which is very much a diphthong.

That’s why they always have such predictable accents in another language.

I've been speaking French since pre-school (albeit in North America mostly) and to me é always sounds more like the English short i (as in "tip"). I'm becoming increasingly convinced that everybody on Earth but me is wrong about it.

Only if your accent is relatively close to General American or Standard Canadian :)

Is it even possible to actually learn the language without living in the environment, where it gets in your face all the time?

You may enjoy the book Latin alive, for me it was a revelation on how the romance languages diverged and took their present forms.

Yes "ambiguë" is pronounced exactly as if it was written "ambigu".

The thing here for those wondering is the masculine and feminine in French, with the feminine created by adding an 'e' (often silent!). "Ambigu" is masculine and "ambiguë" is feminine but as you said without the diaeresis that final 'e' would completely change the pronounciation of the word.

Much simpler, IMHO

single letter = sound

letter + z = "hissing" version of the sound

letter + accent = soft version of the hissing sound

letter + i = same previous item, but caused by "i"

rz = legacy, czechs still pronounce it as a different letter

This is how I understand it as Ukrainian

Westernmost Eastern Europeans would do anything but use the actual script that makes sense for their language. How hard is it to just use с, ш, щ, ч and ц like civilized peoples.

Multiple digraphs, a _trigraph_ and then accents too? Ugh. The real best alphabet is something like Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, IMO.

100% agree with you on that one. And while we are it, now that we live in the computer age, why aren't we huffman-coding the whole language? that would be heck of a lot quicker instead of all slowing down to help the bunch of illiterates who can't remember the pronunciations.

It's actually the French who are being normal. And the rest of European part of Indo-European language speakers.

Une langue qui se simplifie sans arrêt n’est pas systématiquement meilleure.

Cough, though, tough, ...

Good luck guessing the pronounciation just gotta learn it. Clearly the superior system.

I'm a native English speaker who's very exposed to French, but doesn't speak it, I find the use of accents in French very welcome to getting the pronunciation right when exposed to a new word. English is just a mess in comparison and I wish it had made use of accents as well to avoid a lot of the ambiguities in pronunciation. Perhaps some of the old English letters that are no longer in use helped a bit, but I'm not familiar enough with those to know if it used to be better.

Them be fighting words! But as a native French speaker, I wholeheartedly agree that it is a tricky language. But there is so much pleasure in speaking it that I miss in English sometimes. Fabrice Lucchini (an actor) is speaking about the language of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (an author from last century): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHrkC3vaqB8 Even if you do not speak French, I hope the passion comes through.

Cześć!

That's more of an orthographic problem than a language problem.