I have a couple things to add to this thread, not everything directly related to your comment.
1) Knowing the 26 letters is not remotely enough to be able to read the newspaper in English (earlier commenter made this assertion). Example: "She caught a cough. Such is life and death, dear!" How does knowing the letter "u" help you pronounce half those words? What about "g"? What about "h"? What about even if you put "gh" together? What about "e", "a", and if you shove "ea" together? In this single paragraph I've ballooned the number of letters and letter combinations needed into the 40's, and I've barely just begun. Don't get me started with borrowed words from French and Spanish (c'est la vie!).
2) Your comment: "You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese" - From direct first-hand experience, this is tough for a completely different reason than this comment thread is talking about. You've gone off on a tangent here. The reason Chinese is hard for English speakers is that tonality suggests overall sentence semantics, it does not directly affect any single word, whereas tonality affects every single word in Chinese. I thought we were talking about how syllable pronunciations were expressed by the writing system.
1) Knowing the 26 letters is not remotely enough to be able to read the newspaper in English (earlier commenter made this assertion). Example: "She caught a cough. Such is life and death, dear!" How does knowing the letter "u" help you pronounce half those words? What about "g"? What about "h"? What about even if you put "gh" together? What about "e", "a", and if you shove "ea" together? In this single paragraph I've ballooned the number of letters and letter combinations needed into the 40's, and I've barely just begun. Don't get me started with borrowed words from French and Spanish (c'est la vie!).
2) Your comment: "You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese" - From direct first-hand experience, this is tough for a completely different reason than this comment thread is talking about. You've gone off on a tangent here. The reason Chinese is hard for English speakers is that tonality suggests overall sentence semantics, it does not directly affect any single word, whereas tonality affects every single word in Chinese. I thought we were talking about how syllable pronunciations were expressed by the writing system.