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Comment by a-saleh | Hacker News Reader

I don't envy native english readers, as my teacher said, "I wouldn't be surprised if one day English write Manchester and read Liverpool".

I am not sure of all Slavic languages work best with phonics, but one I learned seems it does. Like if you just read the sound of each letter fast after the other, you are 80% saying the word :)

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Serbian is a slavic language with 100% letter for letter pronunciation. You can probably learn to read in Serbian in 30 mins and impress your friends. Understanding it is another matter :)

I agree with this, however to be pedantic even in Serbian (or BCS more generally) there are some homographs (in ordinary orthography at least) which are not complete homophones - the classic example being grâd "city" / gràd "hail". It's definitely not ghoti though ;)

No, you still actually need to properly learn the language. Just reading the letters out loud will make you miss the word accents/stress, at the very least you'll sounds wrong, at worst you'll mix up words.

Russian is even harder, as accent can change the sound a letter makes - e.g. unstressed "o" is pronounced as "a".

That's regional accent. In Moscow it would be like that, but in other parts unstressed "a" would be pronounced more like "o" instead.

The thing that impresses me about this is that this was achieved intentionally, possibly spearheaded by Vuk Karadžić [1] and continued by others [2] - at least that's what they drilled us on in grade school back home. When we had a choice to write down English (or any foreign) words we could write it down in source form or "po Vuku" - "by the Wolf" - where we would write down the sounds in the pronounced word. It was almost like writing in the international phonetic alphabet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Vukovians

I can't resist linking this video: https://youtu.be/A8zWWp0akUU "What if English were phonetically consistent"

Gallagher used to do this as part of his routine. Second half of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

Isn't that how Arabic and Chinese work? Vastly different spoken languages for the same writing? Chinese at least does, but of course they don't even pretend to have phonics, where English is on the fence.

Well, with Arabic writing you are not supposed to write wowels, so when I attempted to learn it, I mostly read the shape of words at once. But I didn't really get beyond 'This is Rami and that is his book' :)

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