I would say I agree. That being said, my experience is biased from working in Big Tech where the accents are on such a wide spectrum that people have no choice but to develop a "flexible" ear.

Yeah, this is my major difficulty with French, and it's even more difficult in colloquial spoken French which may drop entire syllables or words. I often find African pronunciations of French to be easier because they seem to pronounce each syllable distinctly.

Having grown up in two languages where dictée is a thing, I was always bemused by spelling bees. You have to spell one word? And have loads of time to do so? Pah!

While helping my children learn French spelling, I was horrified when I realized that there are 6 or 7 ways to write the sound [ɛ̃]: un in (im) [i]en ain aim ein

For anyone wondering, passage and massage entered English at very different times. Passage entered in middle english (around 13th century), while massage entered in the 19th century.

The most fascinating i find the pronunciation of 'women'. Of the word, i mean.

Gruau would be closer to grew-oh, if it helps.

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.

It's my go-to (pun intended) whenever a native English speaker complains about other languages being "hard to pronounce" :)

Until you start learning kanji and then some of the readings of words are just completely irregular. Why is 明後日, the day after tomorrow, read as あさって???

Or "est" (he is) and "est" (the East) although English also has plenty of such "non-homophonic homographs"...

> And the least phonetically consistent is English.

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.

Spanish also has that property, i.e. given a word (existing or invented), there is a single way to pronounce it, easy to determine following some rules.*

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.

> The most phonetically consistent language I know is Finnish. I believe there is exactly one way to pronounce every word and it's clear to all speakers.

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.

Finnish is not unique in that it has quite a few dialects like most other languages.