French VS English

Which one is more regular???? I heard that French even not being phonetic it has pronunciation rules. is it true?

Je parle pas Française. So, I wouldn't know.

Jim ne parle pas français, alors il ne sait pas.

French is a phonetic language in that there are rules governing the pronunciations. "aux" is always "oh" and never anything else. Whereas in English, "ough" can be "uf" or "oh" or "ow."

We can thank Tabisora for bringing us this poem but it seems to be unknown who we can thank for writing it.

A Dreadful Language

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, tough and through;
Well done! And how you wish perhaps
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead
For goodness sake don't call it "deed".
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt)
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose
Just look them up and goose and choose,
And cork and work and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive
I mastered it when I was five.

"-ough-" can be pronounced
"uf" as in "tough",
"ow" as in "bough",
"of" as in "cough",
"oh" as in "dough",
"up" as in "hiccough",
"au" as in "thought" &
"oo" as in "through".
The word "thorough" is a tricky one I say "thara", Americans say "thoroh".

this is a good french site where they slagg up english people,,,it is actually quite funny



http://www.petardas.com

scottish
Your 'so-called French' site is not French but Spanish. You either can't ditinguish between French or Spanish (ce qui est pas trop grave) or want to make fool of people. If you aimed the latter, you should know : that's not funny ! 'c'est pas drôle' !

Donn't visit scottish's site if you are not interested in porno.

In French, there are several spellings for the same sound, but as Clark said, it's all regular (well, there are a few exceptions though, but that means there are rules!). Which means you can read a French word you don't know with a proper pronouciation, whereas you can easily be mistaken with a new English word.

The first time I saw the word 'feather' in Harry Potter, I thought 'feether' in my mind.

In French "eau", "eux", "au", "aux", "eaux" are all homophones.

If you learn French and English from scratch, English seems easier at the beginning. However, little by little you realize that French becomes easier to learn and to master. One reason is that French is more regular than English.

Exactly, everytime you read "eau" and "aux" it sounds the same. Whereas in English, "ou" is not always "ow," and "ow" is not always "ou." ;-P

ow = cow
ow = bow
ou = house
ou = cough

Yes Chantal and Clark
The more you learn English, the harder it seems to be.
The more you master French, the better is.

The difficulty with French languge, at the beginning, is the spelling, conjugation and the concord with past participle, gender and number, ...etc.

Yes, but most languages have this, and most of them are extremely harder than French.

According to my sister, Japanese is difficult at the begining, and after... it's hard too! Would you agree, Tabisora?

Chantal, "eux" ne se pronounce pas "o", il est donc en trop dans ta liste.

Kabam, contrary to french Japanese has a regular conjugation and no article. So, in my opinion the only hard point which you discover when starting learning it and which remains then is the WAY TO PUT THE THINGS!!!!!!!!

English: I'm familiar with this place
Japanese: it's precise to me here

See?

At the beginning, our 'French native language' is harder than English because of the articles, verbs and stuff, don't you think? But if you read any English novel, you discover the English grammar is definetly not that easy...

Have you ever learned anything about the American Indian languages or Gaelic? There are some similarities like, "happiness is upon me" meaning "I am happy." Also, to say something like, "the dog bit the boy," in Shawnee, it literally means something like, "he dog boy the he bit." Really weird.