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Comment by freediver | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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

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.

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 ;)

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