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>That surprises me because Spanish is one of the few languages that what you read is pretty much what you have to say.

Sanskrit is like that too, pretty much, i.e. as far as:

"what you read is pretty much what you have to say"

goes. There is only one way to pronounce any letter or compound letter or word. In fact Hindi is too, except for regional differences in pronunciation, and both are unlike English in this respect, where a non-native speaker often fumbles to pronounce some words right (even apart from accent), because the right way to say a word can be very different from how it looks when written (if you try to build up the sound of the word from its component letters, at least in many cases).

Examples of this are: cut and put, argue and vague.

IIRC George Bernard Shaw made a well-known observation that I learned as a kid in English class; he is supposed to have said something like: in English, going logically by how you say / spell parts of other words, you could spell "fish" as "ghoti", i.e. "f" as in the "gh" of "laugh", "i" as in the "o" of "women", and "sh" as in the "ti" of "nation".

>Each letter has its unique sound and in very few cases the combination of them forces you to make an unexpected sound

In Spanish, the letter combination "ll" (two ells) sounding like a "y" is another unexpected one, as in "amarillo" (yellow) for example.

https://translate.google.com/#en/es/yellow

Click on the speaker icon under "amarillo" to hear it spoken.

"j" being pronounced as "h" is another one, at least for speakers coming from English.

Interesting stuff.




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