One thing the English language is notorious for is not having any consistent pronunciation rules. French or Spanish might turn up an exception to a couple of their rules here and there. English is nothing but exceptions.
The common explanation is Britain's patchwork history: a once-Celtic land ruled by Romans, then Teutons, Norse, and finally the French-speaking Normans. This makes sense until you remember that being colonized by multiple other nations is actually the norm in European--and world--history. The historical explanations are a little more complex and interesting.
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It's been said the two most difficult languages to learn are Chinese and English. Having been lucky enough to have learned English at my mother's knee (as the saying goes) it turned out, like so many others, I never had to learn another. I never did either. Yes, I learned some French in high school long ago, but never enough to be proficient in any French speaking area, whether in Montréal or Paris native speakers often sneered at my attempts and answered in English. I may have done better with Spanish as they seemed to be far more tolerant of novices.
But you wrote about English being so full of exceptions that it's difficult and that's true.. mysterious but true. Chinese, Mandarin being the most common, is difficult to learn because the spoken language is tonal. A word changes meaning depending on how it is sounded. The written language has around forty thousand characters with two to three thousand considered necessary to read a simple story. However, the written language is stable whereas the local dialects are often incomprehensible to people outside particular districts. And we thought English is hard.
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btw: I made a mistake the other night - I should have said Janet Leigh was in Psycho.
It's good that Spanish speakers are more tolerant of novices, as there are still so many of us. It's an interesting and often beautiful language, with bits of Arabic enlivening the Latin base. It's also very fast, which I think has always been what trips me up. Chinese would have been an interesting language to learn, and I wonder if that might soon become a regular option with American students. Of course the unusual thing is that when you read something in "Chinese" you're seeing--if you can understand it--the meaning conveyed. The characters could correspond with any number of different sound combinations from different spoken languages, Mandarin being the most common (as you say.)
French is a little weird even among Romance languages because of its habit of palatalizing the last consonant in a word into oblivion. Like if a word ends in the letter "t" you don't really pronounce it, unless it's followed by an "e." I haven't learned where that practice came from. Was it a Gaulish thing?
What was the context? Janet Leigh was of course in quite a few things, including Touch of Evil and The Manchurian Candidate.
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