English on the other hand has so many exceptions (usually based on the origin of the word), that I still encounter words that I'll mispronounce at first. I can typically pass as a native speaker, until I "leak" by tripping on one of those.
Though one downside which I've gleaned from friends who are non-native English speakers, is that the variance in pronunciation in English does sometimes lead to native English understanding what you meant, whereas in Spanish if you're pronouncing it wrong the listener often has no idea what you're trying to say. That's heavy anecdata though. I'd be super interested to hear from others if that's been their experience or not.
I've worked in universities and in tech, in New Jersey, LA, and Silicon Valley, and I feel like I can understand just about anyone's English.
Ironically, the ones I have the hardest time understanding are almost always Brits.
My spouse finds it amusing, which is probably the biggest benefit, TBH.
I’m not a native English speaker and I gave up trying to pronounce th (father, through). Although I can hear the difference.
Why can't the Québécois count to four? Because there is a tree in the way.
After a cursory search it seems my Parisian-ish accent is at fault: https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Prononciation/fran%C3%...
The former for me have a bit more exhale and round sound while the “in” are a tad drier.
For example “fin” and “faim” are distinct for me. However “faim” and “feint”
Doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, but it's staggering how internally inconsistently English is.For example "read" and it's famous past tense, differently pronounced "read".
Still, we've got a couple fun ones au Québec, like betterave "bet-rav" caught me off guard or gruau "gree-au".
There's the classic squirrel/écureuil situation where the French word is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, and the English word is hard for French-speakers.
Loving my bilingual spot of the world.
> about [...] the way a word is written [vs.] the way it is spoken.
That concept is called pronunciation.
I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!
English is not really one language in a sense given that it uses words from some many others. Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, etc.
Relevant concept here is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
Source: native French speaker and professional translator.
And the least phonetically consistent is English.
Finnish (from what I've heard, as I don't speak it) is even more regular in the sense that this also works the other way around, i.e., if you hear a word, you can use rules to know how to spell it. This does not always hold in Spanish (e.g. B and V are pronounced the same, so you cannot know if you're hearing "vaca" or "baca" without resorting to context and common sense reasoning) although it does hold for all but a small bunch of grapheme pairs.
* Modulo regional variants, but if you focus in any given variant (e.g. Spanish from Spain) this holds.
Within a particular dialect, that is.
I guess maybe they're not "languages you know", so your statement is still accurate, but surely the Chinese languages and Japanese are even further than English on this spectrum. Some (but not all) Chinese characters encode how the character was pronounced in ancient Chinese, which might give a vague hint to how it's pronounced in modern Chinese languages, but that's about it. And Japanese is even worse: most Japanese words are written using Chinese characters, but the same character can have several different pronunciations (for example, the same character might have three pronunciations: one for a Chinese loanword, another for the same Chinese loanword that entered Japan in a different century, and a third for a native Japanese word whose pronunciation isn't connected to the Chinese pronunciation at all). Also, one character in Japanese can have a several syllable pronunciation, whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese at least, polysyllabic characters are extremely rare.
It's even better than that, there is a single sound for each letter individually. Put together those sounds and that's how the word is deterministically pronounced, no guessing or learning (or even understanding) necessary.