> The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master.

Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish).

Compared to languages where the primary script isn't even phonetic, though, I don't see it.

What I’ve always wondered about this is if there’s a better way to present this: pronunciation in English is sort of path-dependent and I wonder if a two-phase approach of recognizing the etymological groups (Germanic-origin, French-origin, Spanish-origin, etc.) and then applying the rules for that group would make the pronunciation appear more regular.

I can immediately think of a counter example: corps vs corpse. Literally from the same word origin, wildly different pronunciation.

That’s not a counter-example: the Latin root “corpus” was borrowed through French twice: once in the 16th century (corps) and once in Middle English (first corse, then corpse). This is a case of path-dependence: the newer borrowing is pronounced more like French while the older one has been regularized.

It's a definite advantage if a language is phonetic (eg German, Turkish) but there are also worse than English. French springs to mind.

English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin).

Also, at least the vowels are written in English (unlike, say, Arabic or Hebrew, generally speaking).

French pronunciation is more consistent than English, by far. Not that it is a high bar. There are more rules (digraph, silent letters and such), which is more complicated initially, but English is particularly inconsistent.

I don’t think words become more regular with time, actually. There are plenty of irregular words of Saxon origin much older than the Norman conquest. This can be seen easily in lists of irregular verbs: there is almost no Latin root there.

I don't think that's true about French. It has some weird rules, the refusal to pronounce the last consonant in a word is especially galling (ok, pun was intended), but it's fairly consistent once you figure it out.

English, though, is a slough. Enough practice, thorough practice, and you'll get through it. But it's rough going.

As a late learner of French, I was delighted to discover that the exceptions are CRLF, so DOS line-endings

I think that's also the reason why Indians have a thick accent while speaking English.

A lot of the languages we learnt in India have a script that's spoken exactly the way it's written. The words contain all the information on how to pronounce it and there are no exceptions. This seems to carry over when we try to learn English (mostly to the everyone's amusement hah).

I’m a native British English speaker with two postgraduate degrees and I still come across words that I know the meaning of but when I think to use them in conversation I realise that don’t know how to pronounce them. Sometimes you just have to say ‘I’m not sure if I’m saying this right but...’ and have a crack at it.

Pedantic nitpick here, but the issue you are raising is orthography, not pronunciation.

A difficult pronunciation implies that a language has difficult sounds that non-native speakers can't pronounce (regardless how those sounds are spelled, or even if the language has a writing system at all).

Informative. Thank you for the correction.

English spelling really is terrible and needs a full writing reform.

That’s only slightly less likely to complete successfully than any other major system re-write.