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Comment by Pooge | Hacker News Reader

> Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language.

Oh, just like English!

/s sorry I'm only half-joking but written English makes no sense

Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.

The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.

Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.

Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).

I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.

I'm sure it used to make sense when words when pronounced differently. Pronunciation changed but not the writing. Which means it doesn't make sense at our point in time.

I've been learning Greek at the same time my son has been learning to write. By my count, Greek has like 40 basic pronunciation rules; English has something like 500.

But I also spent over a decade learning Mandarin and am still trying to maintain it... the characters are just another level. My son at least can take a stab at reading words he hasn't seen before; having to look up basically every new character is quite a grind.

I've learned Japanese and I understand your point completely. I can't say for Chinese but in Japanese there are some words (and even kanji) that you can read even if you see it for the first time–if you get better at reading kanji. Some words just make no sense but that's true even for native speakers–especially for place names.

They put more emphasis on the meaning of the word than reading itself. As opposed to French where you know how to read it instantly–but you don't necessarily understand it.

In English, I realized that there are words I mispronounced/misread my entire life before hearing a native person say it outloud. That's because I only ever encountered the word in its written form.

My favorite recent oddity:

I was driven to the store, so I drove to the store. The store drove me there.

My passenger was driven to the store so he asked me to drive him to the store. So since the store was driving us to the store, I drove us to the store. We've become good friends since he was driven to the store. I'm glad the store drove us to the store.

Even though I usually prefer to drive cattle.

It's like learning to read English after speaking fluently for a few years. You may only need the letter sounds and then you can guess the rest. Learning Chinese works that way. You learn some basic characters and then you can guess the rest. (Learning to write without a computer is definitely more of a challenge though.)

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