French Spelling Isn't That Bad

can't believe i did the thingy wrong i wrote "ils ont" a second time instead of replacing it with "ils écoutent", silly me

Written and created by K Klein
Art by kvd102
Additional writing and editing by @Annatomyy
Music by K Klein

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Natheniel Siu - Cantonese
Sicilanguageist - Italian
Le Napolitain - French

#french #linguistics

[slaimiaadem]

Being a guy who has spent 9 years learning French, I see that, from my experience, the only way to learn it is by just seeing the rules, expecting them to appear as examples in the next lessons and pray forcibly to God that the teacher would explain them again and again until you learn them all.

[gugusalpha]

The thing is: when a French native speaker see a new word in their language for the first time, you can be sure they'll have the right pronunciation on the first try. That is more rarely the case for a native English speaker in the same situation. That makes me think French is actually much more consistent than English.

[glo_bin]

1:10
Boy I hope someone got fired for that blunder
Now in all seriousness, I hate when people say ortography makes no sense. It does make sense, it's just more complicated

[Akaykimuy]

circumflex does make a difference in pronunciation in some dialects.
For example in Quebecois: "bette" is [bɛt] and "bête" is [baɪ̯t]

[jonasholmqvist]

As a Swedish speaker who now speaks both English and French fluently and uses both daily, I can guarantee that French spelling is super regular compared to English 😂

[Mahawww]

I think French looks wilder on paper to someone who doesn't speak it but once you know the rules it becomes actually really easy to read them most of the time.

While English usually doesn't look that crazy but it doesn't have as many rules to explain its eccentricities when they occur.

[LePLusCoolDesCools]

As a native French speaker, I want to congratulate you for your quite impressive pronunciation.

[lorenzomartinelli]

The fact that you were grateful for the French to drop an “s” from “isle”, turning it into “île” is very fun because the word “isle” in English has the exact same silent “s”

[tennesseedarby]

I’m an American who has learned French, and in my opinion French spelling is much more consistent than that of English. There are a few weird words such as oignon or fils, but at the very least the vowel system is almost entirely regular, unlike English’s. Certain frustrations are the double L, which can just be either Y or L, but aside from that, I know how to pronounce a new word perfectly from seeing it

[roggeralves]

I speak Portuguese as a first language and English as a second, and I've been learning French for a few months now. French spelling is weird at first, but it is very consistent once you get the hang of the rules, *very* unlike in English. For example, in English you can never know what "ea" is going to sound like. Take "bread", "meat", and "break". All three have different vowel sounds and you have to memorize each one! At least in French "eau" always sounds like /o/ (as far as I know).

[MelvaCross]

One of my linguistics professors had a fascination with French. If you know the rules, you can read every French sentence without mispronouncing a single word (almost). Which is a far-cry from English which is impossible to sight-read correctly. Heck, it's even more consitent in this regard than German.

[silverash]

when i learnt french i found the orthography surprisingly intuitive, I wonder if knowing english orthography helped with learning the french one by knowing not to let our guard down… also knowing about sound shifts between the two languages makes knowing french words that resemble an english equivalent easier to guess the pronunciation off

[samanthajr]

I'm a French teacher and the thing is that French's weird spelling is actually such a boon to English speakers. If you can figure out from the accents what the historical Old French spelling and pronunciation was, you can make an educated guess as to what the English meaning is - école to escole to school, for example, or coût to coust to cost. As I always say, what's your most important tool in learning French? A good English vocabulary!

[SamAronow]

The circumflexes are useful if you speak Spanish, because you can just know to add the dropped s back in and magically understand the word.

[lol-xswz]

I never thought French spelling was bad. It is certainly better than English. Most of the time when reading French text, you can correctly guess the pronunciation but not vice versa. English however you can't guess the pronunciation when reading texts AND vice versa.

[robert]

French spelling is really no more or less complicated than English orthography. Frankly, I always found it far more consistent and it is much easier to guess how a word is pronounced in French.

[ornithoxav]

ê/â/ô etc. are still useful (in their own way). they explain why an "s" (sometimes others letters as well, but lets not get into this) appear in derived words:
"hôptial" but " hospitalier"
"forêt" but "forestier" etc
"âme" but "animique" (this one is tricky lol)

[kanskubansku]

Finnish writing system gets often called a "good writing system" based on its consistency and straightforwardness, but we actually have a similar phenomenon to liaison. Many Finnish words that used to end with a consonant, dropped the last consonant and replaced it with a double ending, aka a sound that doubles the following consonant (an adds a glottal stop in case the following letter is a vowel). But this sounds is not written at all and most Finnish speakers do not even recognize its existence. Probably because it is not written and we learn in school that "Finnish writing system is phonetic". However, you can really *hear* the difference, especially with Finnish learners, because in Finnish, sound length is very important, and the lack of pronouncing the double ending (which again, is not written at all) can change the meaning quite a lot.

[bensadventuresonearth]

This silent letters and circumflex diacritics are tools that help us figure out the origin or etymology of a word, and are often helpful linking them with other languages like Latin or German or Spanish... For example fenêtre = Fenster (german) -> i remember "Fenster" thanks to the circumflex which means there used to be a S after the E in the latin word. Or for instance you can tell that "forestier" is the adjective relating to "forêt" (forest) and it is not related to "foret" (drilling bit) or "fort" (fort/strong/stronghold) or "force" (force/strength) which look and sound rather similar but have completely different meanings.

[SpiderEnjoyer]

The irony of being told that french spelling sucks in english doesn't escape me.