Nah, it's common in German too. For example, the first parts of "Widerspruch" and "wiedersehen" are said/heard the same, so you just have to learn the spelling. Many, many other examples... Although on the scale of languages German is indeed closer to phonetic spelling than some others.
But if you were asked to spell the words, you'd produce something close to what was expected, rather than drawing a blank. The question "how do you spell wiedersehen" contains in itself a lot of clues.
This feels more like "what's the Unicode character for 'full moon'?" I'd be able to recognize the result as correct, but if I don't know the answer, I just don't know.
(Of course, that goes too far in the other direction. I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up, whereas most people wouldn't recognize the first half of a Unicode code point. As the grandparent poster said, it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages)
> I assume you can draw a few strokes to "get someone started" on a character and they'll pick it up
In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
I guess there's several levels of character amnesia here, from "I remember half the character" to "I have no clue but I'll recognise it".
> In my experience this is not actually the case; I can usually remember a few parts of the character but draw a blank on the rest. You can see the picture of the grocery list that for some characters he got basically half the character right but gave up on the other half (shrimp is the combination of 虫 and 下, you can see he remembered the first half).
That one's just bizarre, since 虾 is also just the most intuitively obvious choice to form a substitute character if you do forget the right component. If anything, I don't think pinyin substitution is something you do unless you're a highly-educated computer user who deals regularly in Latin script. It's a striking "man bites dog" moment, but the one has been passed around since 2006 (cf. https://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_refor...) and is not, as far as I can tell, indicative of any particular trend. Discreet literacy outliers in jobs where you'd expect it are ... a thing in English too: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153
(It's honestly weirder to see someone write jiu菜 than 9菜 too.)
> it's an exotic problem that's hard to empathize with in phonetic languages
This, it's honestly not helpful to pretend it's the same as misspelling a word in a phonetic language because it's not and it's not even a good analogy to begin to understand the issue.
I do not think that the example is good. "Wider" and "wieder" have different meanings, even if they are probably derived from the same word.
I do not know if this is true in all the German dialects, but at least some pronounce "wider" with short "i" and "wieder with long "i", so they are easy to distinguish when heard (like the difference in English between "fill" and "feel").
English and German appear to have had a similar semantic evolution for this pair of words, because "wider" means "against", while "wieder" means "again", so in both cases a single word has evolved to cover these two different meanings and the variants have become differentiated in pronunciation too.
I'm a native German speaker and i don't know of a dialect in Germany that would pronounce "Widerstand" with a short "i". Would you mind sharing which dialect you think of?
"ie" is always long. For "i" it depends on the splitting of the word, i think. I don't know if this is a concept in other languages too. I think the rule is that if the "i" is at a split, then it is long, but i'm not sure and there are always exceptions to every rule in German. Consider "Schnit|zel", "Lis|te" (short) vs "Bi|bel", "Wi|der|stand" (long).
I have worked for some time in Germany and this is how some coworkers pronounced it, but I do not know where were they from.
From what you say I assume that the literary pronunciation is also with long "i", which is good to know.
Perhaps they were influenced by the different spelling, because I have seen this phenomenon in other countries, where despite a mostly phonetic writing some words were spelled differently than pronounced, for etymological or other reasons, and then the pronunciation of those words by many people has shifted, matching the spelling and not the traditional pronunciation.
I don't know any German, so I can't comment on this, but I'll add that the concept of a spelling contest (like we have in English) wouldn't make sense in a lot of languages because the spelling of words are so obvious/consistent.
If you need an example of a germanic language that has a very regular phonetic spelling I think Dutch is a better example than German. German has a lot of idiosyncrasies, because the spelling tries to preserve the etymology of the words. In Dutch they don't bother trying to preserve a word's history, everything is written as it sounds. (With a handful easy to memorize exceptions)
Finnish does this very well too. There is only a few tricky parts, but in general the spelling and pronunciation match. And if they don't, obvious solution is to write as word is pronounced. Which is a drift, but I think it is more desirable way.
And Italian. Way back in time I used to get phone calls (at work) from Italian customers not speaking English, and I could always write down what they said on the phone, and get it right. Always. I knew very little Italian at the time.
Hmmm not so literate people (or just children) make a lot of mistakes writing Spanish because a bunch of letters are pronounced the same. And then the “h” when not preceded by a “c” is silent, which causes issues.
What is true however is that of you learn the pronunciation rules you should be able to read a text correctly even if you have no clue what you’re saying. That’s not true of English for example.
Is it? There is a lot of historical spelling in Spanish, though not as much as English. German, on with the other hand, has its spelling routinely updated every few years.
Spanish is indeed somewhat more phonemic in spelling, even though it's not as good as Finnish, Turkish, or Serbo-Croatian.
That said, Spanish and German are both so much better than English that the difference between them can be disregarded in this context. The irony is that almost any major European language (with the notable exception of French) has better spelling than English; and even French, although it's horribly overcomplicated, is more consistent when it comes to reading.
The historical spelling is quite limited, and mostly for retro-compatibility. Spanish tries to be
understandable across a large number of countries and rules must accommodate old Spanish dating from the XV century.
