You must log in or # to comment.
you have 11 letters. You pronounce 4 of them
The remaining letters are recycled into English. Pronunciation is still based off the same 4 letters you used in French, except you don’t have access to them anymore.
French is what you get when your Spanish skills are so good that you speak it in fractals.
It’s really weird for me as a spanish speaker. I can nearly read french since a lot of the words are cognates but when i hear it spoken i might understand one word in twenty. Their pronunciations are fucked.
French phonology was heavily influenced by Germanic languages, unlike Spanish and Italian.
For better or for worse, the orthography (writing system) did not really keep up with the changes.
So instead of French being half way between Italian and Spanish, like you might expect, it’s really it’s own thing when it comes to pronunciation.
I don’t know how big this effect really is but French changed their orthography during the renaissance to make it more Latin like
The woes of a rather conservative orthography and an aggressively evolved phonology.
Haha, I have the same problem but with spanish as a french speaker. I find italian much easier to understand.
Honestly same for me with italian.
Can I ask what you think of portuguese pronunciation? I can read it but its not possible for me to understand it when spoken… In comparison I learned spanish at school and it was the easiest langage to learn thanks to my french.
I’m not a speaker of any Romance language, but Portuguese does sound kinda Slavic to me for some reason. That part of the Eastern European Portugal meme checks out.
LangFocus has a video about that effect. It’s called something like “Why does Portuguese sound like Russian”. There are quite some phonetic and phonotactic similarities
Link: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=Pik2R46xobA
There’s actually a lot of totally separate parallels here, I guess they just hit a certain critical mass when combined.
The last one. The french writing system in its roots.
They begin to pronounce words, then suddenly go on strike.
Start each word and then decide it’s not worth the effort and trail off
I learned french in the late nineties, years were hell.
Kids these days have it good, not needing to count past 25.
Vigesimal. Even their math sounds horny.
And Portuguese is a mix of French and Spanish, but if it was mixed together by drunk who didn’t know either of those languages
I’m struggling learning Portuguese is what I’m trying to say
I usua’y joke that it’s like Ita’ian but whẽ’ you just woke up ã’d your tõ’gue did not, so you prõ’õu’ce thĩ’s mostly the sã’ except for a few missĩ’ cõsõ’ãts.
[I usually joke that it’s like Italian but when you just woke up and your tongue did not, so you pronounce things mostly the same except for a few missing consonants.]
Serious now. If you want some help feel free to ask. I’m a native speaker.
That’s actually pretty accurate lmao
My girlfriend speaks Portuguese natively so she helps me with it, but there’s only so much she can do when my body also isn’t accustomed to the nasal vowels, and I’m also an idiot lol
Nasals are easy, just raise your hands, position two fingers around your nose, and press it shut.
It’s a bit tiring but exactly the same results as closing the air passage between your nose and throat.
