Why French is so hard to understand

The author's spot on with the liaison and elision rules.

> Nasal vowels are especially hard for English speakers like myself because, well, our language doesn’t exactly have any

I hadn't heard of these.

> To new learners ‘son’ and ‘sans’ may sound approximately the same while the sounds ‘in’ and ‘un’ are so similar that they are even merging into a single indistinguishable sound in some regions of France.

This is the real killer. Short and frequently-used sounds which overlap. It's good that un gets to sound more like in, because now it doesn't have to sound like both a, as, and à, which are way more common.

I was under the impression that French people think son and sans sound the same. Not to mention sont, s'en, and the other meaning of son. And all the back-halves of words which that sound ends up in: poisson, boisson, croissant. As MC Solaar says:

  Mais j'ai supporté le croyant, la croix, l'étoile et le croissant
  Le sans-croix, le sans croissant, mais l'agitation croissant

Or t'es, tes, thé.

In comparison, Spanish is so much easier to learn and understand. Every English speaker would benefit from learning it in order to leave their monolingual mind sphere. But i digress...

This is ridiculous. It's a beautiful language and not hard to understand. Of course it also depends what your native language you are starting from, but the article is provoking needlessly.