0

I started to learn English by listening English news, from time to time I will come across some word that I have not learnt, with only pronunciation how can I get the spelling of the word?

When you learn Japanese, if you heard some Japanese word you don't know, by inputing the content you heard you can easily get the word. For example, assume DA is a Japanese word and its pronunciation is ABCD, by inputing ABCD you will get DA.

Sato
  • 231
  • You can't. You just have to guess, or ask someone who knows the word. That's the problem with English spelling: it does a very poor job of representing English pronunciation. The better you get at English, the more likely you are to be able to make an educated guess at the spelling and actually be right; but even native speakers won't know that /bəˡloʊni/ is written bologna, or that /ˡvɪtl̩z/ is written victuals. In fact the reason they didn't is why the alternative spellings baloney and vittles are now so common. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 15 '17 at 08:11
  • Also, it's not easy at all to do the same in Japanese either. Even more difficult in many cases, in fact, especially names. If you meet someone whose name is Hannawa, what kanji should be used to write that? 半縄? 帆奈和? 樊那倭? Or perhaps something completely idiosyncratic like 島? Even outside names, monosyllabic words are all but impossible to guess. How should the word jō be written, for example? 常, 城, 情, 縄, etc.? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 15 '17 at 08:17
  • Its so sad to hear that there's no easy way to guess in English. For the Japanese part, at least I can get a list of candidates and easy to guess according to the context. – Sato Mar 15 '17 at 08:40
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it seems to be asking for resource recommendations rather than language usage. – Skooba Mar 16 '17 at 11:56

0 Answers0