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Comment by ahakki | Hacker News Reader

Learing to pronounce French words is rather easy. English is a huge mess.

Easy? Fine. But it's still a huge waste of time on a global scale compared to phonetic languages, when you consider how many people have to learn French, English, etc.

It’s relatively easy for an English speaker to learn because we have a lot of French vocabulary, but the correspondence between pronunciation and spelling isn’t simple[1]—although granted it is somewhat simpler than English[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_orthography#Sound_to_sp...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Spelling_p...

I don't think it's obvious that 3 of 7 letters in "mangent" are silent (as in "ils mangent").

Yes it is obvious once you learn French.

It’s usually (not always) clear how a word is pronounced in French if you know its spelling.

What isn't clear is how you spell the word after hearing it.

Really?

French (there are quite a few of them - think CA for example) has just as many idiosyncrasies as English when you really get in to it.

This is categorically wrong. French spelling has absolutely nowhere near as many idiosyncrasies as English spelling.

It is totally impossible to predict how an unfamiliar written word is pronounced in English, but quite easy in French (barring some ambiguous situations like if a noun ends in “s”.)

By the way, I don’t know what CA means. If you’re referring to the French word “ça”, its pronunciation is completely regular and predictable given the spelling.

Well, it's possible, but only if you know where did the word come from.

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