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Comment by HankStallone | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered: do speakers of other languages enjoy spelling bees and puzzles based on spelling and wordplay as much as English speakers do? It seems like spelling bees wouldn't be as interesting in a more phonetic language, for instance.

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They don't exist.

A French kid can reasonably spell words they hear, even if there are a lot of unpronounced or apparently useless letters.

I've heard from a Chinese friend that the same is true for Mandarin. Apparently most written words have a "meaning" component and a "pronunciation" component (excepting the most common words, which are easy to learn by rote).

French orthography competitions are on a different level. Spelling of difficult words combined with grammar rule exceptions.

French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.

Those are "phono-semantic compounds" for anyone looking to do more reading up on them. The example that springs most readily to mind is "嗎" (in Pinyin "mǎ") which is a question particle you put at the end of sentences meaning, roughly, "is it not so?" The left character is "口" meaning "mouth" (in Pinyin "kǒu" but that's neither here nor there) and the right particle is "馬" in Pinyin "mǎ" (and meaning "horse" but that's neither here nor there).

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

In Germany spelling bees don't exist. Took me a while to understand why it is a thing in American culture.

Not that German is "pure" but even with words you don't know you got a fair chance of being right most of the time

I haven't heard of them in England. They probably happen but do seem more of an American thing.

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