French Learning 0001 · Phonetic languages

I'm learning French for my trip to France this December, using Oxford Take Off in French. (I've collected a huge amount of learning material for all the fields I'm planning to explore. See below.)

So, while reading the introduction, I noticed that the author describes French as "not a phonetic language." I discussed this with my AI learning companion (for which I've designed an entire set of skills and workflows), and here's what I now understand.

In a "phonetic" language, spelling and pronunciation match up closely. With a less consistent spelling system, the same sound can have different spellings, or the same spelling can represent different sounds. Take French, for example.

So a good way to learn this might be to treat each of those frequently used letter combinations as a unit in its own right and map out the sounds it can represent.

When we read a word aloud, we see a letter or a combination of letters and make a sound by following the language's pronunciation rules.

The more consistent these spelling-to-sound patterns are, the more "phonetic" the language is. Spanish and Finnish are good examples. French and English are less "phonetic" by comparison.

French is lopsided, though. Going from spelling to sound is fairly regular. Once you know the rules, you can read most words aloud. Going the other way is the hard part. Hear /o/, and you still have to guess which spelling it takes. English is tricky in both directions. So for French, I can learn to read first and let the spelling come with time.

Thinking of "phonetic" in terms of sounds and how they're represented helps me make sense of the term here. Or, more simply, "How closely does the spelling reflect the sounds?"