French is weird - 10 things I find surprising about French

Why does French feel so… weird? In this video I dig into what makes French bizarre — from its famously “illogical” spelling to its surprisingly large vowel system, and the way it’s drifted away from its Romance cousins like Spanish and Italian. We’ll look at: why French spelling didn’t keep up with pronunciation how French ended up with 16 (or 17!) vowels depending on dialect the homophone problem (so many things sound identical…) why French lost so many verb endings — and what replaced them why French pronouns behave in a way that might intrigue an alien linguist the Gaulish legacy behind quatre-vingts and the counting-by-20s system stress in French: not “last syllable of the word”, but the end of the phrase (plus a newer emphatic pattern you’ll hear in the media) and a quick detour into how French negation evolved from ne to ne…pas — and then to pas in everyday speech. If you’ve ever wondered why French sounds the way it does (and why it sometimes refuses to do what you expect), this one’s for you.