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Comment by xeeeeeeeeeeenu | Hacker News Reader

English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.

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But you're really talking about orthography.

No, English is pretty rough in both orthography and phonology: while it's nowhere near as bad as e.g. Chinese, English has a large number of vowel sounds compared to most languages, and several uncommon consonants that many people struggle with if not exposed from birth.Note how many non-native English speakers, no matter what their first language, struggle with dental fricatives ("th").

Dental fricatives are somewhat 'poor' sounds generally - they don't have a lot energy, so they tend to be difficult to recover in noisy environments. And note that even in English dialects these dental fricatives have a tendency to shift to other sounds (e.g. to alveolar stops).

While English pronunciation/inventory may be harder than say Spanish or Italian, I think it's pretty middle-of-the-road compared to other languages in terms of size of inventory/difficulty.

English is only roughly middling in terms of phonemic inventory (about 40). Romance languages tend to be on the phonemically sparse side of things, but Germanic languages have broader phonemic inventories. And while the thorn/eth are difficult to pronounce, I'll take those over Arabic's pharyngeals, thank you very much.

Every language has tradeoffs. Sure, Spanish might be easier to pronounce since the rules are more rigid, but on the other hand the information density is way lower. It takes 2-3 syllables of Spanish to communicate the same information as 1 syllable of English.

Yes, but the rate at which languages convey information is roughly the same [1]. So Spanish speakers just speak faster.

[1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_...

The PDF linked is a draft of the paper, freely available; it's been removed from Academia, so here's the JSTOR link of the final release:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23011654

Hahaha, reminds me of this Itchy Feet comic http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2015/09/conspiracion.html#.W1u...

In the paper you link to, the information rate of English is about 10% higher than Spanish. That may not seem like much, but it's probably enough to matter.

For speaking, sure, but if you are writing then Spanish will take longer because you have to physically type out more characters.

As a fluent speaker of both languages I couldn’t say. In general Spanish requires less mental effort as you write what you say, whereas in English there’s always that particular randomness that’s otherwise arbitrary between how to write a word and how it sounds.

That doesn't really matter, you get used to more than a dozen quite different pronunciations within a week for basic talk, within a few months you can understand each other perfectly.

EDIT: Visit England you cunts (wrt downvotes).

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