French pronunciation isn't all that bad!

Although I admit some of the sounds of the French language can be difficult for native English speakers to replicate, there is one very positive point about French pronunciation that hasn't been made here: it's very regular! That is, there are (unlike in English) very few words that are spelled as though they should be pronounced one way and actually pronounced some other way. The trick is to learn what spellings go with which sounds in French, and to try NOT to apply your English phonetics (for instance, to remember that "oi" is always pronounced /wa/, and never /o-ee/ as it would be in English). And despite the fact that some of the sound-spelling correspondence rules can seem a bit random (like the example I just gave), there are almost no exceptions.