3 ms·

I think everyone who learned English has memories of pronouncing a word for the first time while reading it repeatedly. The fact that this is a usable way of le

I think everyone who learned English has memories of pronouncing a word for the first time while reading it repeatedly. The fact that this is a usable way of learning words shows the it's fairly phonetic. Contrast this to Chinese for example, where the symbol has almost no relation to pronounciation and some dialects are unintelligible even though the written form is exactly the same.

rspeer 9y ago
I think you're making a bit of a weird comparison by comparing English to supposed languages that have mutually unintelligible dialects. Mutually unintelligible ways of speaking should be considered different languages, not dialects. Of course, politics interferes with this. For example, saying that the many ways people speak in China are "dialects of Chinese" is the PRC government's view, but linguists say they're deluding themselves. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Hokkien, and so on are different languages. So here you should be comparing English to Mandarin Chinese, not to every language that gets called "Chinese". Mandarin has even less inflection and word variation than English. It's true that its writing system is a mess, though, and it's even messier that it's used to write other languages that don't have their own standardized written forms.
- shouldbworking 9y ago
  There are many languages less phonetic than English, Chinese is just the best example I can think of. I was just pointing out that English spoken and written are close enough that you can learn one from the other.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    I think Chinese is an example that's so extreme, it's not really very useful for such comparisons. Anyway, if we look at European languages, English is the one that's extreme in terms of how non-obvious the correspondence of its script and its phonetics are. It's not just that the mapping is very arbitrary - French can be similarly arbitrary in dropping consonants, for example - but it's also very inconsistent. You think you've learned how some combination of letters is pronounced by looking at some word and then hearing it... and then you find out that the same combination can be pronounced in three more ways. There are still patterns behind all it, and eventually you grok them, but they're way more complicated than "this letter plus this letter gives this sound", which is typical of other languages - or at least such simplified rules can be used to speak in a way that others will understand. Not so in English - you have to learn all those exceptions and subtle rules to be understood. A few examples: "live" / "life"; "leaf" / "leaven"; "over" / "oven"; "even" / "seven"; "dew" / "sew"; "dull" / "bull"; "mint" / "pint".

rspeer 9y ago

I think you're making a bit of a weird comparison by comparing English to supposed languages that have mutually unintelligible dialects. Mutually unintelligible ways of speaking should be considered different languages, not dialects. Of course, politics interferes with this. For example, saying that the many ways people speak in China are "dialects of Chinese" is the PRC government's view, but linguists say they're deluding themselves. Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Gan, Hokkien, and so on are different languages. So here you should be comparing English to Mandarin Chinese, not to every language that gets called "Chinese". Mandarin has even less inflection and word variation than English. It's true that its writing system is a mess, though, and it's even messier that it's used to write other languages that don't have their own standardized written forms.

shouldbworking 9y ago
There are many languages less phonetic than English, Chinese is just the best example I can think of. I was just pointing out that English spoken and written are close enough that you can learn one from the other.
- int_19h 9y ago
  I think Chinese is an example that's so extreme, it's not really very useful for such comparisons. Anyway, if we look at European languages, English is the one that's extreme in terms of how non-obvious the correspondence of its script and its phonetics are. It's not just that the mapping is very arbitrary - French can be similarly arbitrary in dropping consonants, for example - but it's also very inconsistent. You think you've learned how some combination of letters is pronounced by looking at some word and then hearing it... and then you find out that the same combination can be pronounced in three more ways. There are still patterns behind all it, and eventually you grok them, but they're way more complicated than "this letter plus this letter gives this sound", which is typical of other languages - or at least such simplified rules can be used to speak in a way that others will understand. Not so in English - you have to learn all those exceptions and subtle rules to be understood. A few examples: "live" / "life"; "leaf" / "leaven"; "over" / "oven"; "even" / "seven"; "dew" / "sew"; "dull" / "bull"; "mint" / "pint".