Apart from all the silent letters, which are fairly regular (and I assume is what you're getting at) there's a fair number of pronunciation exceptions.

See the different ways of pronouncing "tous" or the different words that have irregularly silent "l"s (e.g. fusil) and other irregularly silent consonants in the middle of words (e.g. automne).

French has quite a lot of exceptions to its pronunciation rules in addition to its already fairly complex regular relationship between letters and sounds.

EDIT: Oh I forgot my pet peeve: there are so many exceptions to the pronunciation of "er" that it's kind of misleading to give its pronunciation as the equivalent of an English "a" as in "slate" (hiver, cher, cancer, mer, the list goes on and on and on).

Those are some good examples, you're right. It is quite a bit less regular than I remembered from my high-school days.

For 'er' though, isn't the rule essentially that it is pronounced 'a' at the end of verbs, and 'ar' otherwise? I realize that is not a phonetic rule, though.

Unfortunately no. See e.g. boulanger, cahier, etc. (Although I do believe you're correct about verbs, I wasn't able to think of any verbs that pronounce "er" irregularly).

I don't know of any regular, even semantic, rule off the top of my head that covers when it should be pronounced which way for non-verbs. I wonder if someone more versed in French etymology could find one.

How many ways are there to spell the sound ō (as in l’eau) in French? I once read that it was over 30, but it might have been a tongue-in-cheek joke, like "ghoti" as an alternate spelling of "fish"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

As far as I know, there are two: 'o' (as in 'bon') and 'eau' (as in 'beau').While that's one more than it should have been necessary, it's not that bad I think.

maux? culot?

I feel like we can find more ;-)

But I have learned I had a misconception about what a phonetic spelling is. I had thought that a phonetic spelling had the property of every sound in the language having one way to spell it, but that is not the case; instead for every grapheme there is one sound.

As a native English speaker, learning a little French (after German and Latin) opened my eyes to the horrors of English. Really French is very tame in comparison.

Forgot about 'au'; I think the x and t in these examples are misleading, they are just part of the general rule that final consonants are not pronounced (though there are exceptions to that rule).

compare with "ough" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)

Granted, my experience with French is rather limited and the language could be pretty consistent internally. But there's lots of utter madness such as "beacoup" which is literally "buku".

Sorry for being blunt but pronouncing 50% of the letters is extremely non phonetical. There's just no other way of putting it

Beaucoup is 'boku', not 'buku'. And having groups of letters be pronounced as a single sound is not the opposite of being phonetical, as long as the groups are used consistently (e.g. -eau- is always pronounced 'o', -ou- is always pronounced 'u', final consonants are never pronounced etc.) .

Granted, the sibling comment lists quite a few exceptions to these rules, but it is still quite a regular language.

The system of silent consonants is quite useful in keeping the language have somewhat regular declensions/conjugations. If they were not preserved, it would seem that French conjugations are mad, inventing consonants out of thin air. For example, coup/coupee, meaning to cut/ cut (up), are pronounced ku/kupe. This would make it seem like the participle is adding -pe to the infinitive (and it would add -te or -ze or many others), when in fact the participle is almost always adding -e, which forces the consonant in the root to be pronounced, since French really hates hiatuses.

If anything, French phonetics are the real problem, aggressively dropping consonants of the end of words, but loathing hiatuses, sometimes even between words in literary contexts (where sometimes a 't' or 'z' sound is added between a word ending in a vowel and the next word beginning with a vowel, 'la liaison').

French is fairly predictable, there are pronunciation rules. On the other hand you have English where you have things like "weird", "weight", "heir" and "receipt", "recipe" and say "sniper", this uncertainty around "data", "direct", "neither" etc, and as a pragmatic rule there are no pronunciation rules really, you have to learn the language twice.

If your native language has sane spelling correspondences this feature of English never ceases to amaze and to be honest baffle, even bother you.

Will this vowel in this particular word be the diphthong you'd expect according to the patterns you've inferred up to this point or some wild monophtong just because? Let's find out!

As for the French, good for them, they speak a world language that is also one of the three working languages of the EU. My native language is another world language. English is a lingua franca nowadays, but there's no methaphysical necessity about speaking English, it's just popular enough and therefore convenient.

I think you're confusing things. A difference between the number of written characters and the number of phonemes doesn't make a language "non-phonetic" if you mean consistency between spelling and pronunciation.

What matters is that a sequence of symbols _consistently_ matches a phoneme. For example, you'll find that the "u" phoneme is often written as "ou" in French. Same thing for the "o" sound and "eau" (you misspelt "beaucoup").

What I would consider "non-phonetic" is the set "though", "through", "thorough", and "thought" in English, where "ough" has four different sounds.