"Acquiring French spelling, reading and pronunciation rules in school encounters many difficulties. They result from the complexity of the system itself, the degree of complexity of its description and the lack of greater interest in systematic teaching of orthography at the level of the developed materials for teaching French, mainly school textbooks. The article shows the phonetic difficulties encountered by a Polish student while learning the rules of reading and pronouncing French words with the consonant s. It also contains a number of valuable comments and information on the transition from a graphic sign to a phonic sign in the process of teaching and learning French as a foreign language."