Dragon27 wrote:From my experience (a native speaker of Russian), English spelling is far more inconsistent and littered with exceptions (and harder to guess the pronunciation from) than French. Sure, French decided to keep its historical endings which don't exist anymore, but you quickly get used to them. There's a certain consistency to them, some letters are often silent, some aren't, and you start to feel that intuitively after some time (of course, there are some exceptions here and there, you should always consult a dictionary).
As a native English speaker, I agree. If you study the phonetic patterns (if that's a real expression?) of the two languages, French is much more predictable when it comes to reading and writing.
I remember listening to a podcast about bilingualism (French/English). A teacher was commenting on her and other teachers' observations at a bilingual English/French school in NYC. It was quite a flexible program in that those with their mother tongue being French would be taught to read and write at the blingual school in French first. Same for native English speakers - English first. Strong bilingual cases (perhaps one parent one language situation at home, thereby having two native languages - FR + EN) were decided on a case by case review from memory as to which language would be their first language to learn to read in.
The Francophone students who learned to read and write French first were significantly faster at reaching a good reading/writing level than the native English speakers learning to read and write in English first. While I can't remember the specific numbers and I may be way off now, were I to guess, the difference was at least 6 months (if not more) longer for those learning to read and write English first compared to those learning the same in French first. I assume that all students had exposure to both languages in the form of speech throughout their schooling, given it is a bilingual school, and the intention was to teach reading and writing (as well as the other skills, ie listening and speaking) of both languages to all students eventually.
The teacher (the podcast was in French) was explaining that the phonetic unpredictability of English when learning to read and write was the cause of the longer duration for those learners. So significant was the delay that those who learned to read and write French first actually began learning and made significant in-roads on reading and writing their second language - English, to the extent that they were matching the English first learners after a couple of years (again rusty on the times) in English after having learned French first. ie. The French (reading and writing) first learners had caught up in English (reading and writing) level to the English (reading and writing) first learners who hadn't moved onto French yet.
When I've watched my eldest daughter learning to read at home with us - my wife teaches English, I teach Dutch and French (we homeschool), the Dutch predictability seems so easy to her, the French seems trickier than Dutch, but still predictable and yet much easier than English. This isn't a dig nor a competition of French vs English (or Dutch), it's just that some languages are not very well represented in spelling in terms of their phonetic predictability, or transcribing what you hear into words. English is a nightmare. French I feel is unfairly labelled as complicated.
Furthermore, back to the bilingual school situation. Comments were made (by the same teacher) at the school towards the end of the podcast around how Mandarin (native) pupils in China learn to read books such as Harry Potter at a considerably later age than Europeans/North Americans etc. The discussion was then around the complexity of Mandarin and that it takes several more years for pupils of Mandarin to be able to tackle certain literature that would be read earlier in languages such as English or French in their corresponding native contexts. Of course this is all anecdotal, but interesting food for though all the same.