Spanish speaker here: when you are a child you are taught "M plus A sounds MA", no further explanation needed. Obviously we have a good bunch of exceptions to the regularity of the language:
* B and V sounds exactly the same.
* ll + vowel and Y + vowel sound he same.
* Y can work as the vowel I.
* C, K, Q and Z share and overlap pronunciation:
+ CA, CO, CU = KA, KO, KU
+ CE, CI = ZE ZI (these later two are not valid combinations)
+ QUE, QUI = KE KI. (All other Q combinations are not valid).
* H is always mute!, except for ch + vowel which always sounds like in chocolate.
* G and J:
+ Strong: JA JE JI JO JU, GE, GI.
+ Soft: GA, GUE, GUI, GO, GU. This makes the sounds GU followed by "E" or "I" need a special writing: GÜE
+ Ñ: no comments.
Bonus point: the word "sal+le", imperative of go and indirect subject of the action is the third person, can not be written as it would be said, as the two consecutive L wold become the sound of Y.
Re:The Chaos (1922)
by marcosdumay on Monday June 15, 2015 @10:51AM
(#9719674)
Well, Spanish certainly has some inconsistencies, but it's more consistent than both French and Portuguese. And verbs are easier to use.
Since I speak German quite well, I don't think I would've known how to pronounce and write down umlauts before I was shown how to. I don't speak Spanish, so I don't know about that. In (some) Slavic languages there is a rule that each character is one voice, but then there are characters you have to learn how to vocalize first, and there are some ambiguous cases as well - letters č and ć for example. Even native speakers can't tell much of a difference for most of the time.
In Polish, letters ó and u sound exactly the same. There isn't a single case where using ó instead of u would cause a word to be pronounced differently. It's something that apparently used to make a difference centuries ago,but it doesn't anymore, and nowadays even experts in linguistics don't know how exactly it used to sound. And it's exactly the same with "rz" and "ż" - both pronounced in exactly same way.
As mentioned in other comments, Spanish and German, for instance, are consistent. You know exactly (mostly) how to write a word even if the first time you heard it and you know how to say an unknown word that you see in writing.