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Comment by cheerlessbog | Hacker News Reader

English has a relatively idiosyncratic relationship between letters and sounds. Does phonics work even better in languages that have regularized spelling, so "sounding out" always works perfectly? I could imagine that a native speaker would find it easy to learn to read in such a language.

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Yes. Speakers of Russian, for example, find the concept of a "spelling bee" to be completely nonsensical--if you hear a word and can't spell it, you must just be completely illiterate, and vice-versa.

I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.

In Spanish: word -> sound (is straightforward). sound -> word (not so straightforward).

So, spelling does make sense, but it's not much of a thing like in English. We have some rules to aid the process, but at the end of the day, you need to have read a lot to know how truly write a word.

That being said, I find kind of weird the cue process described in the article. I think that in Spanish we always learn by identifying letters with sounds as there's a 1 to 1 relationship in that direction. I.e. every written word has only one possible pronunciation.

My mom was a middle school Spanish teacher, and her favorite trick was to promise her Spanish I classes that they’d be able to read (but not understand!) just about anything within the first week or two.

And indeed, they could - eighth grade Spanish I students had to have had an A in English the previous year, so they were all decent English readers.

I’ve found that German is mostly phonetic like that, but not quite as consistent as Spanish is.

This is not correct. A large part of Russian language curriculum in schools consists of dictations[1], as Russian is not strictly phonic (mostly it's unstressed vowel shifts, such as 'о'>'а').

It's nowhere close to English though. Spanish spelling is a breeze, much simpler than Russian.

Unrelated factoid: in my experience, average Russian has more chances to reproduce believable Spanish pronunciation than English.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)

I know that. I went through it while learning Russian. Nevertheless, the spelling system is close enough that, in my experience, that is in fact the point of view held by the majority of native Russian speakers--if you hear a word and don't know how to spell it, or see a word and don't know how to pronounce it, you need to go back to school. It's not something worth holding national competition about, or an ability worth being proud of, and Russians I have known are consistently baffled by the concept of an English "spelling bee".

Idiosyncratic is quite a friendly way to describe it.

Written English is jus plain awful and makes no sense whatsoever. It is basically impossible to read english without knowing the words and thus how to pronounce them.

You can read whole german sentences without understanding a word but still pronounce them correctly.

This is something you will often find in children reading a book; where the pronunciation is basically correct and then they ask what a certain word means at the end.

English speakers just stutter step across unknown words and are often unable to finish the sentence when they encounter something unknown.

This sort stuttering is really jarring and happens a lot even to adults.

Being german but reading a lot of technical stuff in english, the nonsensical nature of written English is just mind boggling.

In Bulgarian, we have a simple and direct mapping between sounds and letters. “Phonics” is the way we are taught to read and write - although I don’t think we have a name for it, it is simply “the way to learn to read”. I don’t know about any other way to do it and the methods described in the article sound nonsensical to me.

I remember how confused I was the first time I saw the concept of a spelling bee in a movie as a kid. If you know how a word is spelled, you can always correctly read and pronounce it.

Yeah, I was thought how to read at 4 or 5 by a fellow kindergartener, who I think was told by her parents. I entered elementary school where most learn how to read and write already being able to read pretty much anything in Czech.

Having a regular (and in Czech simple) transliteration is in my mind similar advancement as are letters compared to letter-words (as in Chinese).

And this is no conincidence - the way Czech is written was largerly engineered in the 19th century during the national movement.

And in the opposite direction, how does this work in a language like Chinese where "spelling" isn't a thing at all?

In Japanese, they start by teaching the kana syllabaries (which are phonetic and very regular), and then from 1st grade onwards they start the grueling task of memorizing the 2000+ kanji characters you need for basic literacy. But in Chinese it's all characters from day one, with a few crutches like pinyin/bopomofo for annotating readings.

> And in the opposite direction, how does this work in a language like Chinese where "spelling" isn't a thing at all?

The same principle applies. The challenge just changes from reciting the correct sequence of characters to performing the correct sequence of strokes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Characters_Dictation_C...

As a speaker of phonetically spelled languages the whole thing reads like an onion article. The idea that you can teach reading without going through letters and syllables first never really crossed my mind.

English basically forces you to remember most of the words. The rules are the maze.

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