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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids.

If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. "Sound out." Now there's a word I haven't heard in a long time.

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The vast majority (some 80%) of Chinese characters are phonetic-semantic compounds, that is they contain both sound elements and meaning elements.

So it's actually very useful to study phonetic groups in when learning Chinese characters!! Even when there are tone or vowel shifts, the phonetic groups can really help you match a character to its sound.

It's kind of like the situation where English spelling usually diverges from an exact phonetic representation, but it still provides an approximation of the actual pronunciation of the word which is enormously helpful in matching it to its spoken form.

A funny story about that. When I was a kid, I had two different words in my head: one which was pronounced "muh-sheen", and another which I found in The Way Things Work, that was spelled 'm-a-c-h-i-n-e' and pronounced "match-ayn" (rhymes with chime). That's what I got from sounding out the word. I had two parallel concepts in my head growing up, one rather technically oriented that involved inclined planes and levers, the other being machines like toasters, or whatever was on This Old House, probably. This ended when one day, I read something else that used the word and realized, rather excitedly, that there was no such thing as a match-ayn.

Even if phonics are not used when reading, they still have an advantage for writing. Rarely in my adult life have I found myself sounding out a word in a book unless it is deliberately ridiculous (as your example). But I definitely sound out words when trying to spell a word.

I still occasionally sound out words (incorrectly) when I stumble on a word that I finally realize I've gotten wrong in my head. Like I'll know the word, know what it means, but have imagined the wrong pronunciation in my head, only to have it suddenly dawn on me that "Hey, that synonym for this word you know that sounds a bit different, what if it's aactually the same word". Then I'll go look it up in a dictionary, realize I still don't know pronunciation guides, type it into Google or whatever to get audio, and confirm, yup, I'm a dumbass I've been thinking those are two different words for decades.

This happens to me about once every other month. Millions of words, I don't expect it'll ever stop happening.

Bonus points when the word is like only 6-7 characters long, feel extra dumb those months :P

Ha Ha yes.

I find this with a lot of niche things I only ever read about, open source names seem to be the worst.

Gnome is allegedly pronounced with a hard G. I've never heard that said in the wild. And I have no idea how anyone else pronounces XFCE.

Nginx I still pronounce as "en-jinks" to myself and have to be guarded to remember to say "engine-ex".

MySQL had never been "my see-kwull" to me but always "my ess-queue-ell".

Then there's Linux ...

"en-jinks"

That's how I thought it was pronounced too. NginX could maybe have provided a hint...

Welcome to the enjinks club :).

The reverse is also happening to me - it has become very hard to see furniture advertised as latex, and read lay-tax, not la-tech.

Um, don't tell me LaTeX isn't "lay-tex"?

It isn't: https://www.latex-project.org/about/

Quinoa Cliquey Segue ... I had the exact same experience with these three and probably more. I'd love to see more examples if you have any

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