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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty unfortunately uninformed comment. But I especially want to point out this piece:

> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.

I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."

And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:

打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)

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My wife is from Taiwan and she complains about English spelling all the time.

She should try French, she won't complain anymore about english spelling ^_^

sure, in English the exceptions are so frequent you cannot possibly forget that you are supposed to learn each word separately. in French you can fall to a few traps, but most of the vocabulary follows complicated yet regular rules.

French spelling is quite regular. Once you know the system, you know how to spell almost any word. The only issue is that some letters are not pronounced.

Dude no. I am French native speaker, and think that French spelling is way harder. I am even starting to suspect that the spelling of the French language was made hard on purpose, so someone who didn't get a proper education would be spotted easily to his/her bad spelling.

Really? I'd be curious to hear what French words are as bad as the 11 pronunciations of "ough" in English ("Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through)". Or, the other way around, there's the /eɪ/ diphthong, which can be spelled a, a…e, aa, ae, ai, ai...e, aig, aigh, al, ao, au, ay, e (é), e...e, ea, eg, ei, ei...e, eig, eigh, ee (ée), eh, er, es, et, ey, ez, ie, oeh, ue, or uet in the words bass, rate, quaalude, reggae, rain, cocaine, arraign, straight, Ralph, gaol, gauge, pay, ukulele, crepe, steak, thegn, veil, beige, reign, eight, matinee, eh, dossier, demesne, ballet, obey, chez, lingerie, boehmite, dengue, sobriquet. Not to mention place names like Featheringstonehaugh (pronounced "Fan-shaw"). What are the most difficult things about spelling French?

That's a little bit cheating, you're adding silent consonants to the vowel when they're not pronounced at all.

I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.

Funny how half of your list are also French words

Well, in my opinion, English is hard to pronounce (for example, it impossible to know to to pronounce the word 'live' without context) and French is hard to spell.

Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/

11 pronunciations of "ough"? I've always heard it as seven:

thought, though, through, tough, trough, plough, and, somewhat questionably, hiccough.

What are the others supposed to be?

The number depends on the dialect. Wikipedia describes it as "at least six pronunciations in North American English and over ten in British English", listing ten of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_%28orthography%29

I thought that it was quite regular. I have two little girl 8 and 10 yo. I can ensure you they are learning tons of exceptions I did not realise.

There is nothing unfortunately uninformed about my comment. There is something unfortunately condescending about your reply.

I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.

Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.

OK, going back to the text of your comment:

> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.

(emphasis mine)

This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)

I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.

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