My favorite version of this is that spelling bees don’t exist in most (any?) other language, because their systems are more intuitive and consistent, but with English, if you can consistently spell words they give you a fucking trophy and you get money for college
There are some other languages that have inconsistent spelling, but most do have some level of consistency yeah, also would character tests in Chinese/Japanese be considered similar to spelling bees?
Not really. They just have multiple pronunciation depending on which vocabulary they are part of/how they are used grammatically.
But let me tell you, learning 2000 kanji and vocab they are used in is a pain. Still love 日本語 thought.
What the heck is a sun truth language, anyways? :)
I’m in the process now, and you’re definitely not wrong!
The meanings of the kanji are: sun - origin - language for 日本語
I’m sure you know this, but kanji have different meanings, and this one refers to Japan being the land of the rising sun.
Haha, yeah, I was just being silly and having a little fun. :)
Although, learning all the meanings certainly does get overwhelming at times, especially when combinations of individual kanji characters can have substantially different meanings and readings than they do on their own!
I tried to change my PC and phone language to Japanese yesterday. I did not last long. It’s seriously hard.
In french we have “concours d’orthographe”. Pronunciation is pretty consistent, but we add a dozen letters for every sound we utter, so spelling’s still a mess.
I’ve seen enough French spelling to get it, though, and I don’t really speak French. English spelling is still often hard as a native speaker.
You guys can have second place, our system is the most ass “bar none”.
Okay English is weird but y’all got nothing on Japanese. I mean what the hell is this?
Multiple systems of writing at once is terrible in a different way, yes. I hear they still have page rendering issues in 2025.
I was more talking about the number of readings for one character but yeah that too.
Our system needs a deep reform; yours needs to burn to the ground and fully rebuild.
Uh oh, the internet is starting the Napoleonic Wars 2: Electric Waterloo.
It just says “This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary”.
It doesn’t say “This man can pronounce every word in the dictionary correctly”.
there should be a word for the feeling of when you can sense the top comment of a post before you open it
“The vision”
I seriously never got the concept of a spelling bee competition until I learned English.
I just learnt about the existence of “spelling bee competitions” through this post. But in English it makes sense that this exists.
i still don’t get it, and i don’t get why people are so up in arms about english in general, feels like people just enjoy having an arbitrary thing to all hate together.
the only really unique thing about english is just how many places were forced to speak it, but it’s not that much more than french…
in the united states, everything is a sport.
you don’t get them in the UK
It’s jarring if you don’t come from a language with fucked spelling however…
in many languages theres clear rules how to pronounce vowels, consonants and combination of such. in english there’s no rules at all. sure there will be always exceptions and oddballs to the rules in other languages but usually you see a word and just by looking at it you know how to pronounce it, but thats not the case in english. not hating on english, its super simple and straight forward in a lot of aspects but the pronunciation clusterfuck is at a stark contrast to being otherwise one of the easiest languages to learn.
I’m really awful at spelling, or pronouncing words I’ve read but haven’t heard before. I’m not dyslexic so I thought I was just weirdly bad at spelling. Then I started learning Spanish and it turns out I can spell just fine - English is the problem, not me.
Always has been.
I treat English spelling like Chinese characters. How you pronounce is at best a hint on how to write.
I remember being in second grade and being taught all sorts of rules about pronunciation and then a few minutes later, be given edge cases.
It was the moment when I gave up saying things correctly. Herb with a hard H, phone with a hard P. City with a k noise. English is stupid.
Listen pal, you spend several centuries invading others and looting their vocabulary and see how much sense your language makes!
Spanish seems to be doing okay
People will really say shit about the silent letters in French and then completely ignore the unbelievably inconsistent pronunciation of “gh” in English.
And the french silent letters are pretty consistent
And why is “kn” even a thing in English?
Knowledge? Knight? Knee? Knapsack? Knitting?
How does that make any sense at all?
Edit" and then there’s Gnome! Why isn’t it Knome? Or Gnowledge?
I’ll be honest I’ve always found it weird that they decided to stop pronouncing those consonants at some point. Those words just sound better with the K pronounced!
Orthographic reform now! Our movement is dozens strong!
go ahead, make a spelling system which works in all dialects.
Not necessary. You can “have your cake” and eat it with spoons of both Aluminum and Aluminium, too. It just has to reflect spoken sounds in some kind of reasonably-direct way.
Hmm. Do Brazilians still spell stuff the Portuguese way? Most of the European languages probably have some kind of prescribed national dialect, Arabic has classical Arabic, and Chinese has non-alphabetic characters, but I don’t know about that one.
did you mean :
orthografik reform now! Awa moovment iz dozens strong?
Stupid question: Doesn’t a dictionary also contain the phonetic spelling?
yes but no one gets taught to drink IPAs in school, you do that at university
the more you drink the more you understand vowel shift and consonant ellision
Imagine living in a country where spelling bees cannot exist
I’m there. I asked how to pronounce a word from a newspaper once, and was told,“like it’s written…?”
I know spelling bees from US media. We had read aloud competitions, that’s the closest thing I know from real life
Don’t most dictionaries have IPA next to the word?
too often it’s some proprietary phonetic spelling which barely makes sense even in the target dialect. yet they have the audacity to use square brackets for it.
Worcestershire (noun)
[ wurs - teir - sheh ]
are you having trouble figuring out how to pronounce words because spelling rules aren’t consistent and don’t make sense? here’s how to pronounce them in a different spelling that follows the same rules.
Name a language without weird exceptions. I think in most this is still impressive.
Spanish. I have a meme about it, I’ll post it in the coming days
Two things about English.
First, English is not one language, it’s a mix of several different languages with loanwords stolen from eveey culture encoutered. Grammar and conjugation is entirely inconsistent because it is based on Romance languages, Germanic languages, and Greek.
Second, English is descriptive, not proscriptive. In other words, there are no rules to pronunciation or spelling. English words are spelled and pronounced the way English speakers spell and pronounce them. That’s how England and America can end up with such disparate spellings and pronunciations. If you are understood, you have spoken English. When new pronunciations and spellings become commonly used, they are added to the dictionary. When speaking and writing styles change, so do the rules of grammar.
Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.
Do languages with sylabic alphabets have this problem?
Many languages have very specific pronunciation rules. If you can read a word, you can almost always pronounce it correctly, especially when accents are uses. You can often determine the pronunciation from the etymology by the language of origin. It’s why spelling bee contestants always ask for country of origin.
Aren’t most languages a mix of several languages?
Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words…Yeah, pretty much every single language. I think it’s funny when someone (usually americans) says their language has words from a bunch of languages because it shows they never really learned a second language. Word ‘clima’ in Portuguese or ‘Klima’ in German is from Greek for example, many languages have english words too, portuguese takes ‘playground’ and ‘check in’ to cite two but it has many more.
English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it’s quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it’s contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.
The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.
For example German imported the word ‘cakes’, but it is now spelled ‘Keks’ inline with it’s pronunciation.
I think it’s funny how the slang word ‘biz’ fixes the spelling of ‘business’
Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don’t seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written “chrome” as “krohm” or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with “ch”. It’s actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.
and english is FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from the worst, thai is afaik basically the same as it was hundreds of years ago, to the point that people can read old texts quite easily.
Also Icelandic is so archaic compared to the other Nordic nations that they can more or less just read thousand year documents like how we may read writings from the 1700s.
