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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

Problem is not the writing, but pronunciation. The word "battery" is the worst in my experience. Everybody understands my pronunciation (Spain, Norway, Singapore) except all of the english-speaking world. But Google Talk to the rescue, it is prounonced "Bäätdrii", but I have zero clue why.

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I feel your pain.

For me, as somebody that learned English mostly reading, to know how to spell a word is easy but I never know if I am saying it "properly" (whatever it means in this crazy language).

I think the opposite is true for the native speakers: they started learning to speak and then they have to learn how to spell.

I used to joke that learning English is like learning Japanese; you have to learn two languages, oral and written.

Having someone to talk to is of great help. Thing is you get to pick their pronunciation as well, so you have to choose wisely :) For example, due to this, I tend to say route that doesn't sound like root. There are some words which have a tendency to sound the same when spoken and you need context during speech to differentiate them (depends on the speaker) - for example, flour vs flower. It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?

"It's definitely a language that needs to be learned both written and spoken, but then which isn't?"

As mentioned in other comments, Spanish and German, for instance, are consistent. You know exactly (mostly) how to write a word even if the first time you heard it and you know how to say an unknown word that you see in writing.

Since I speak German quite well, I don't think I would've known how to pronounce and write down umlauts before I was shown how to. I don't speak Spanish, so I don't know about that. In (some) Slavic languages there is a rule that each character is one voice, but then there are characters you have to learn how to vocalize first, and there are some ambiguous cases as well - letters č and ć for example. Even native speakers can't tell much of a difference for most of the time.

In Polish, letters ó and u sound exactly the same. There isn't a single case where using ó instead of u would cause a word to be pronounced differently. It's something that apparently used to make a difference centuries ago,but it doesn't anymore, and nowadays even experts in linguistics don't know how exactly it used to sound. And it's exactly the same with "rz" and "ż" - both pronounced in exactly same way.

Spanish speaker here: when you are a child you are taught "M plus A sounds MA", no further explanation needed. Obviously we have a good bunch of exceptions to the regularity of the language:

  * B and V sounds exactly the same.
  * ll + vowel and Y + vowel sound he same.
  * Y can work as the vowel I.
  * C, K, Q and Z share and overlap pronunciation:
    + CA, CO, CU = KA, KO, KU
    + CE, CI = ZE ZI (these later two are not valid combinations)
    + QUE, QUI = KE KI. (All other Q combinations are not valid).
  * H is always mute!, except for ch + vowel which always sounds like in chocolate.
  * G and J:
    + Strong: JA JE JI JO JU, GE, GI.
    + Soft: GA, GUE, GUI, GO, GU. This makes the sounds GU followed by "E" or "I" need a special writing: GÜE
    + Ñ: no comments.

Blessing and damnation: the stressed syllable is always encoded in the word.

Bonus point: the word "sal+le", imperative of go and indirect subject of the action is the third person, can not be written as it would be said, as the two consecutive L wold become the sound of Y.

Well, Spanish certainly has some inconsistencies, but it's more consistent than both French and Portuguese. And verbs are easier to use.

Finnish might be a rather good option since there are very few inconsistencies. But then you have to deal with words like päättämättömyydellänsäkään.

Italian is another rather straightforward example but there are a little bit more variety especially for c and g. And for some reason h as a first letter is usually dropped off.

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