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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice to replicate in other languages. In Spanish and German, reading is almost phonetic, unlike English.

Anyway, from my experience with my daughter, the step from single letters to silabes is difficult.

"Reading is almost phonetic" is a largely meaningless phrase. There are some orthographies that are more regular than others. But, indeed, the very confusion people love to talk about with English only works if it is phonetic, but ambiguous.

And just solving for one form of ambiguity does not, necessarily, help. Consider contronyms. Words that are literally their own opposites.

I'm convinced the main thing lost in getting kids to read, is that too many mistake interaction with the words as automatic. It isn't. Taking apart a word symbol by symbol and putting it back together in a different form is the entire point of teaching how to read. And if you don't teach kids to do that with words, are you surprised when they can't do it with equations?

I think you misunderstand. In a largely phonetic language, almost everyone learns to read in one school semester, after which it's a fully solved problem - no spelling bees or anything. Peculiarly, you don't need spelling bees either when learning English later. ("Contronyms" and "words" are orthogonal to reading as they apply to spoken language too (and it's very much automatic).)

I think you don't understand the various orthographies.

Again, you base the claim that English is not phonetic based on confusions in how different phonemes are represented using the 26 symbols of our alphabet. A thing that is defined as symbols representing phonemes. You could also have a syllabary or a logography. The syllabary would still be phonetic, of course. A logographic writing system is truly not phonetic. Think emoji.

And, of course, I'm summarizing very very briefly.

Of course, you don't have to believe me; you could also read about the orthographic depth of English vs other languages on Wikipedia or something. "In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: from the rules of pronunciation, one is able to pronounce the word correctly.[1] That is to say, shallow (transparent) orthographies, also called phonemic orthographies, have a one-to-one relationship between its graphemes and phonemes, and the spelling of words is very consistent. Examples include Japanese kana, Hindi, Lao (since 1975), Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Georgian, Latin, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, and Welsh. [--] English is unusual because it combines deep orthography, with multiple possible sounds for many letters.[2] This makes it among the most difficult languages in the world to learn to read." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth

From the intro of the page you link: "The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence."

So, sure, if you want to discuss about how English orthography is deep, go for it. I won't even really disagree. Quite the contrary.

The opening claim was that it wasn't phonetic, though. That is a different thing.

It is funny seeing Japanese as the first example in your quote, as it has both a phonetic syllabary (two, actually) and a non-phonetic logography. That is, you literally have to learn to read a non-phonetic orthography in order to read Japanese!

[Opening claimer here. Interesting discussion!]

Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule.

I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we say the "ll" almost like a English "sh" instead or an English "lee".

The other day I was joking with my wife, and I told her that to make the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin:

  v -> f
  w -> v
  ei -> ia [in English, something like "ee ah"]
  ie -> ii [in English, something like "ee ee"]
  eu -> oi [in English, something like "oh ee"]
  sch -> sh [loaned from English, perhaps "y" in pure Spanish but it's confusing]

I probably missed a few cases (like the g), and the pronunciation would not be perfect, but probably close enough to be inteligible by a friendly listener.

I can't imagine how to do a similar table in English, at least a table that enters in a napkin. Let's start with the infamous case of "yesterday" does it sound like "today" or "Friday"? How is the rule? Can you classify all the words in this table https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/all/... ?

Exactly. Apologies if I made it sound like you didn't have a point. I have a pet peeve against the folks that think we don't have a phonetic alphabet. A combination of words that is largely nonsensical. Alphabets are pretty much definitionally phonetic.

This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine. And that that is really just 44 flashcards for them to work through.

To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.

All of that is to say, I'm glad you found the discussion interesting! Apologies if my pet peeve came on too strong. :D

I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?

> To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly.

We are also cheating with "ñ" :)

> Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds.

I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w".

I somewhat intentionally forgot "ä", "ö", "ü". (We have an "ü", but the use is very different, it's related to the weird cases of the "g" in Spanish.)

I missed "ß", but that's easy to add to the napkin.

> I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?

Using the "Dora the Explorer" encoding method, I pronounce

today -> too-deh-ee

Friday -> frah-ee-dee (a surprising "ah" in "fri", but a mute "a" in "day")

yesterday -> it depends if you are talking or singing :)

Anyway, my English pronunciation is so bad that I never would confuse "then" and "than", but it looks like it's a common error in some native speakers.

Ah, I think I see. You actually pronounce the "y" in those words? I'm not familiar with any dialects where that is common. I could see it, though. In general, I would expect the pronunciation for all of those is the same. They are all words with the root "day".

Copying from Merriam-Webster for them:

  Today: tə-ˈdā  
  Friday: frī-dā
  Yesterday:  ˈye-stər-dā

The page for Friday does have "-dē" listed, as well. Which maybe is what you are referencing?

Regardless, fun reading. And please don't take this as a criticism of your pronunciation!

From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/today it looks like it's like

  today -> too-deh-I

where the last "I" is like the "i" in "ship" and not like the "ee" in "sheep". I agree that it's not a very strong "ee" sound.

I see /təˈdeɪ/ on that page. Per their https://dictionary.cambridge.org/help/phonetics.html page, the eɪ is how they encode what the other site uses ā for. That is, the "ɪ" is not a separate syllable from the "e".

I pronounce them in the same syllable, but I used an incorrect notation.

There is a reason why German kids don't have spelling bees.

And, of course, the main reason we have spelling bees is that people enjoy them.

In Western alphabetic languages other than French, English, and Portuguese, not being able to spell the word is virtually identical to not knowing how to say the word.

People who spell words wrong in Spanish are either on the one hand mixing up "k" and "que," "b" and "v," maybe screwing up "c" with "k," "s" and "que" or forgetting the accent placement rules; or on the other hand they've literally heard and said the word incorrectly all their lives.

Also, even the misspellings in Spanish will 99.9% result in perfect pronunciation. The accent rules are just about where you're allowed to omit it, or when you add it to a one-syllable word and it doesn't actually indicate an accent. The error you're most likely to make is to put one in when it is unnecessary.

My apologies if it came across differently; but I'm well aware what a regular orthography is.

I do have a bit of a pet peeve on the stance that English doesn't have a phonetic orthography. It absolutely does. To teach kids otherwise is a massive disservice to the kids.

It is easy to think that all of the exceptions to how things work in English are problematic. The catch, of course, is that many of them are specifically used as fun games to play with the words.

To me, it is the equivalent of planned city centers versus organic variants. Reality is almost certainly that both can work. And there will be preference of folks between the two.

But they are only possible because the phonetic rules of English are far from consistent

This feels like a strong reason to keep both, to me. People enjoy them, and they enable fun games. :D

I completely agree. I love the weirdness of English and would hate it to have it smoothed out

You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake! M + I makes "mi" not "emi", so M must be "m".] At least that's how children are taught in Finnish schools since sometime before the 1980s, and since then almost everyone learns to read during the first school semester. Also, one simple and efficient protection against dyslexia is to play the Graphogame (or similar) to get a lot of repetition with the sound-letter correspondences while learning to read (for various reasons, some brains take longer to build the necessary connections and you want to avoid the negative affects of learning slower than your peers if you can).

I agree. My older daughter was learning to read before school, and we started with the usual here in Argentina:

  ma, me, mi, mo, mu
  pa, pe, pi, po, pu
  sa, se, si, so, su
  ...

after a few more rows, we expected her to generalize because she is very smart, but it's harder than what we expected and we have to told her all the 21x5 cases. (The first cases were harder, and the lasts got easier.). I don't remember about the longer silabes like "pra", "bla", ... and there are weird words like "consternado" but I guess it was not obvious.

Yes, I think it will be somewhat random how many cases each child needs to be taught before they generalize. One thing I forgot to mention is that for polysyllabic words, they use a learning aid here: in the beginning, the syllable boundaries are marked with dashes in all text and in the second year, only in longer words. I don't know if it works in Spanish too, something like this: "A-yer ce-na-mos cons-ter-na-dos." Again, I think it's unnecessary for some children but helps others to keep learning while gaining more experience with the syllables.

I contest this. There is no correct "step from" in this. There is a post-hoc explanation for why a lot of things work. And there is some benefit in regularity. But most of this is, as stated, post hoc.

Consider, how do you read "f=ma", or "e=mc^2"? Why don't those follow the same rules? They use the same symbols as our alphabets, after all?

Or consider "do re mi" is pronounced differently from "do re me". And, amusingly, most people will not read those correctly. This doesn't rob the names of the notes as meaningless. Nor does it mean that they are not taught correctly. But you learn to interact with the symbols. Not merely transcribe them between representations.

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