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Re:Text Rendering Hates You by bsder on Monday September 30, 2019 @07:05AM (#21113793)
> And going from spelling to pronunciation is really hard in both dialects.

But you can try. And it will kinda work.

If you pronounce "Sean Bean" as "seen bean" (most likely), "shawn bawn", or "say-an bay-an" (that's gonna require some thought for a native ...) people will scrunch their brow, think a bit, maybe chuckle, and have an idea who you are talking about--especially if they've been around you for a couple days.

English is remarkably error tolerant. You may not get it right, but you will get your point across.

With kanji you can't even try. This isn't about whether English is easy. It's about that fact that the simple act of going from pronunciation to kanji or kanji to pronunciation simply isn't possible at all.

(And choosing a formal name as an example is just asking for exceptions. Japanese, for example, has a whole class of kanji used basically for nothing except names--good luck pronouncing those ...)

Re:Text Rendering Hates You by earthboundkid on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:02PM (#21126942)
> With kanji you can't even try.

I don't want to defend kanji/hanzi as a writing system. It's also in debt to history in a crazy way. But as a non-native reader of Japanese, you can often figure out the pronunciation and meaning of unfamiliar characters based on how they look. A large majority, maybe 90%, of characters have a meaning-part and sound-part, and once you know the common roots, you can get pretty far by just looking at things. You can also move to Korean and Cantonese pretty easily because those preserved the pronunciations of old Chinese pretty well. Ironically, Mandarin did a pretty bad job of preserving old Chinese, so it's harder to match up.

E.g. 楽 (music) is old Chinese nguk, Japanese gaku, Cantonese ngok, Korean ak, and Mandarin yue(??).

Re:Text Rendering Hates You by littlestymaar on Monday September 30, 2019 @05:40PM (#21119932)
> English is remarkably error tolerant

I don't know what's your primary language, but as a French person I can tell you that no, English isn't that error tolerant and people don't understand what you mean if your pronunciation isn't good enough.

I still have traumatic flashback of my younger self desperately trying to buy water (pronouncing “wa” as in waffles and “ter” as in territory) in Canada when I was 15 (and really thirsty)… I think I spent a whole 5 minutes before a French Canadian arrived and saved my day.

Re:Text Rendering Hates You by earthboundkid on Tuesday October 01, 2019 @12:06PM (#21127001)
Did you try aqua? Most educated English speakers should have known that word. :-(