> You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations.

> You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations. If they're already familiar with the Latin alphabet, anyway (which admittedly is a good chunk of the world at this point; even if you're, say, Japanese or Korean, you know the Latin script because it's used pervasively). If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit.