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"Pronounce" by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
(www.smbc-comics.com)
Source: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Pronounce
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Engish is easy. No conjugation - you just have to memorize 50,000 words and you're good.
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Homophones don't impact the pronunciation though, which was the main subject of the top comment (the second part anyway). And I definitely agree that French is not easy for foreigners, especially regarding spelling. But pronunciation rules are much more consistent than in English.
To summarize, my point is that going from the spelling to the pronunciation is (much) easier in French than in English. The other way around (pronunciation -> spelling) is of course much harder in French, as you said, and the French school system shows that: we just have to look at how important the exercise of "La Dictée" is.
Small note to be finicky: "L‘auteur a peur des [otœr]?" is not an issue, since for "auteurs", you pronounce the "liaison" with "des", whereas you don't with "hauteurs". But I still get your point ;)
Well, the joke is about the relation between spoken and written English, so „how do you write [o]“ is just the same joke but in reverse 🤷♀️
And none of that touches my original point, i.e. that written french is syntactically different from spoken French.
Look, I have several German-French friends with whom I took French class in high-school. They grew up with two languages, their spoken French is flawless, they couldn’t write a single paragraph if their lives depended on it.