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For some languages (like Polish) it is nearly sufficient. I imagine for others it will basically suffice (perhapes e.g. Malay and Indonesian). Good luck with Ch

For some languages (like Polish) it is nearly sufficient. I imagine for others it will basically suffice (perhapes e.g. Malay and Indonesian). Good luck with Chinese and other tonal languages, as well as Japanese (no word borders), Korean (dual and triple phonemes on a single grapheme and the order of phonemes on them), and Hebrew without nikud (little friendly smirk). As of English, we come to funny question here, as in it the mapping from graphemes to phonemes is extremely irregular.

fastball 3y ago
Are phonemes relevant when reading?
- SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
  Yes. Subvocalisation is a fundamental part of reading. Even in scripts that (ostensibly) have no ruleset for phonemic mapping (e.g. Chinese), written language has a "voice" for accomplished readers.
- Pabloski80 3y ago
  Was extremely important for someone who learned as a native to read Polish around age of three. First part was learning a mapping grapheme to phoneme for single symbol. Then came a second part - for a day or three picking out that symbol from raw text of newspapers, trying to pronounce its sound every time it was found. Then as more and more symbols were learned, looking up one symbol for a while, then another for some time, then when nearing learning a whole alphabet mixing the patterns to lookup wildly. After memorizing some 20/26 symbols, learning the connecting the sounds, and you could read simple words by then. But again polish is extremely regular language in that sense but a very few of irregular short symbol sequences.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Ok, what I really meant was "are phonemes required for reading?" given that was what was implied by the above thread. Deaf people learn how to read (in every language), so clearly they are not required.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Yeah, I honestly can't think of any language where spelling is as difficult as English. Japanese: the 2 phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are extremely easy to learn IMO, nearly all letters are either vowels or a consonant-vowel pair. Russian: very phonetic, there are some exceptions to how things are pronounced but the rules are very regular. Even French, which has tons of silent letters and heck, silent syllables, is very regular, and I nearly always know how to pronounce something if I read it.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  For Japanese, the choose to talk only about the phonetic system is doing a lot of work, as it is (mostly) just used for grammatical purposes, with most content words being mostly or entirely composed of the non-phonetic Kanji. A typical Japanese student is still learning to write until high school. Presumably, Chinese is similarly difficult for the same reason, but I'm not familiar with that. Hebrew's writing system has vowels, but they are typically omitted.
lelanthran 3y ago
> As of English, we come to funny question here, as in it the mapping from graphemes to phonemes is extremely irregular. IME, it's mostly regular; there are patterns (pronunciation of "ou" in the middle of a word, "tion" at the end of a word, adding "ing" to a word), but there are also exceptions (plural of mouse vs plural of spouse). Just by pattern recognition alone you'd likely cover 90% of common English words. Of course, that involves recognising the pattern: "lon" in "alone" and "along" is not the pattern, while "lo" is the pattern ("*[aeiou][^aeiou]e" is a pattern) They way I've explained it to my toddler is by giving the middle vowel a different pronunciation when a word ends in a consonant followed by 'e' (lace, eke, fine, alone, mule) than when the 'e' is missing (can, ten, tin, don, pun). I've also switched a little to teaching syllables: 'tr' and 'am' can be pieced together. So can 'tr' and 'ai' and 'n'. Still using the distar alphabet though.
- beagle3 3y ago
  > IME, it's mostly regular; there are patterns (pronunciation of "ou" in the middle of a word, "tion" at the end of a word, adding "ing" to a word), but there are also exceptions (plural of mouse vs plural of spouse). I’d like to give you a _tour_ of my _doubts_ _about_ this, but the _courier_ has just arrived with _four_ _doughnuts_ (and their _colour_ is popular in Britain) Not to mention the _lower_ _tower_ I see across the street. We get used to these things at an early age, but compared to many other languages, English is highly irregular.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > I’d like to give you a _tour_ of my _doubts_ _about_ this, but the _courier_ has just arrived with _four_ _doughnuts_ (and their _colour_ is popular in Britain) Right, those are the exceptions I mentioned. There's more, but even in that list, those are not singular exceptions, they're different patterns. They only stop being patterns when, as you did, match the shortest subsequence and not the longest subsequence. Even in the exception list, you have patterns: about and doubt rhyme. If you're Canadian, they also rhyme with dough. four and the 'cour' in courier rhyme. colour and honour rhyme. If we're using regexes, for example, we match the longest subsequence, not the shortest, so "ough" is the pattern in "dough", not "ou". Then it rhymes with though, furlough. The examples I gave, like `tion` as a suffix, should have been clear that I meant the matching the longest pattern (otherwise it would be matched as 'ti' and 'on'). > We get used to these things at an early age, but compared to many other languages, English is highly irregular. Sure, but I didn't dispute that, I contended that 90%+ of common usage is pattern recognition, like doubling of consonants, words ending in `e`, or starting with `in`, etc. An english reader encountering `shibboleth` for the first time will pronounce it correctly, and I claim that that is true for 90% of words in common english usage, because even the simplest words have differing patterns and so readers are forced to learn pattern recognition as a very basic and foundational part of english. It is not as dire as phrase "English is highly irregular" would suggest. To my mind, a highly irregular language would have at least half the words following no pattern, for example rhyming "moot" with "dad". Examples of non-patterns like that are, to my knowledge, not in english. I mean, you could claim that "caught" and "court" are pronounced exactly the same, and I'd point out that both are parts of larger patterns - 'taught', 'aught' and 'caught' are a pattern, while 'court', 'pour', 'rigour' are a different pattern, hence they are both examples of patterns, they just not in the same group of patterns. Look at your final example - lower and tower: lower, grower, mower are all part of one pattern. tower, bower and shower are all also part of a pattern, but it's a different pattern to the previous pattern. You will not, in english, easily spell a word that is not part of some pattern[1]. [1] Although, if you're up to the challenge, I welcome examples of spelling that is not part of any pattern ... :-)

fastball 3y ago

Are phonemes relevant when reading?

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
Yes. Subvocalisation is a fundamental part of reading. Even in scripts that (ostensibly) have no ruleset for phonemic mapping (e.g. Chinese), written language has a "voice" for accomplished readers.
Pabloski80 3y ago
Was extremely important for someone who learned as a native to read Polish around age of three. First part was learning a mapping grapheme to phoneme for single symbol. Then came a second part - for a day or three picking out that symbol from raw text of newspapers, trying to pronounce its sound every time it was found. Then as more and more symbols were learned, looking up one symbol for a while, then another for some time, then when nearing learning a whole alphabet mixing the patterns to lookup wildly. After memorizing some 20/26 symbols, learning the connecting the sounds, and you could read simple words by then. But again polish is extremely regular language in that sense but a very few of irregular short symbol sequences.
- fastball 3y ago
  Ok, what I really meant was "are phonemes required for reading?" given that was what was implied by the above thread. Deaf people learn how to read (in every language), so clearly they are not required.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Yeah, I honestly can't think of any language where spelling is as difficult as English. Japanese: the 2 phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are extremely easy to learn IMO, nearly all letters are either vowels or a consonant-vowel pair. Russian: very phonetic, there are some exceptions to how things are pronounced but the rules are very regular. Even French, which has tons of silent letters and heck, silent syllables, is very regular, and I nearly always know how to pronounce something if I read it.

gizmo686 3y ago
For Japanese, the choose to talk only about the phonetic system is doing a lot of work, as it is (mostly) just used for grammatical purposes, with most content words being mostly or entirely composed of the non-phonetic Kanji. A typical Japanese student is still learning to write until high school. Presumably, Chinese is similarly difficult for the same reason, but I'm not familiar with that. Hebrew's writing system has vowels, but they are typically omitted.

lelanthran 3y ago

> As of English, we come to funny question here, as in it the mapping from graphemes to phonemes is extremely irregular. IME, it's mostly regular; there are patterns (pronunciation of "ou" in the middle of a word, "tion" at the end of a word, adding "ing" to a word), but there are also exceptions (plural of mouse vs plural of spouse). Just by pattern recognition alone you'd likely cover 90% of common English words. Of course, that involves recognising the pattern: "lon" in "alone" and "along" is not the pattern, while "lo" is the pattern ("*[aeiou][^aeiou]e" is a pattern) They way I've explained it to my toddler is by giving the middle vowel a different pronunciation when a word ends in a consonant followed by 'e' (lace, eke, fine, alone, mule) than when the 'e' is missing (can, ten, tin, don, pun). I've also switched a little to teaching syllables: 'tr' and 'am' can be pieced together. So can 'tr' and 'ai' and 'n'. Still using the distar alphabet though.

beagle3 3y ago
> IME, it's mostly regular; there are patterns (pronunciation of "ou" in the middle of a word, "tion" at the end of a word, adding "ing" to a word), but there are also exceptions (plural of mouse vs plural of spouse). I’d like to give you a _tour_ of my _doubts_ _about_ this, but the _courier_ has just arrived with _four_ _doughnuts_ (and their _colour_ is popular in Britain) Not to mention the _lower_ _tower_ I see across the street. We get used to these things at an early age, but compared to many other languages, English is highly irregular.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > I’d like to give you a _tour_ of my _doubts_ _about_ this, but the _courier_ has just arrived with _four_ _doughnuts_ (and their _colour_ is popular in Britain) Right, those are the exceptions I mentioned. There's more, but even in that list, those are not singular exceptions, they're different patterns. They only stop being patterns when, as you did, match the shortest subsequence and not the longest subsequence. Even in the exception list, you have patterns: about and doubt rhyme. If you're Canadian, they also rhyme with dough. four and the 'cour' in courier rhyme. colour and honour rhyme. If we're using regexes, for example, we match the longest subsequence, not the shortest, so "ough" is the pattern in "dough", not "ou". Then it rhymes with though, furlough. The examples I gave, like `tion` as a suffix, should have been clear that I meant the matching the longest pattern (otherwise it would be matched as 'ti' and 'on'). > We get used to these things at an early age, but compared to many other languages, English is highly irregular. Sure, but I didn't dispute that, I contended that 90%+ of common usage is pattern recognition, like doubling of consonants, words ending in `e`, or starting with `in`, etc. An english reader encountering `shibboleth` for the first time will pronounce it correctly, and I claim that that is true for 90% of words in common english usage, because even the simplest words have differing patterns and so readers are forced to learn pattern recognition as a very basic and foundational part of english. It is not as dire as phrase "English is highly irregular" would suggest. To my mind, a highly irregular language would have at least half the words following no pattern, for example rhyming "moot" with "dad". Examples of non-patterns like that are, to my knowledge, not in english. I mean, you could claim that "caught" and "court" are pronounced exactly the same, and I'd point out that both are parts of larger patterns - 'taught', 'aught' and 'caught' are a pattern, while 'court', 'pour', 'rigour' are a different pattern, hence they are both examples of patterns, they just not in the same group of patterns. Look at your final example - lower and tower: lower, grower, mower are all part of one pattern. tower, bower and shower are all also part of a pattern, but it's a different pattern to the previous pattern. You will not, in english, easily spell a word that is not part of some pattern[1]. [1] Although, if you're up to the challenge, I welcome examples of spelling that is not part of any pattern ... :-)