Phonetics is important!
I learned to read (thanks Mom & Dad!) using phonetics. Nearly all written languages (except for Chinese) are written phonetically...we'll ignore Welsh for now, haha. I can't imagine trying to learn to read a foreign language without the skill of phonetics. There's no way you can learn from practice to recognize words in a foreign language. (I can't imagine trying to use "whole language" in English!). For example, if you've never seen PECTOPAH in Russian, and you know Russian verbally, you can sound it out and get "restoran" - restaurant! Since I'm studying Japanese, I'm now reading a kid's book that is written totally in Hiragana; I don't understand some of the words, but I can at least read it out loud.
posted by Andy in San Diego and Elsewhere at 10/24/2005 05:04:00 PM
2 Comments:
You're welcome. That has always been my problem - no phonetics. Didn't learn them young - had to wait until I took Russian in college to get the hang of them. Is Hiragana the latin alphabet version of Japanese? Even I can do a bit of sounding out Japanese because it IS so phonetic.
Try Danish.
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