[sdrothrock]

> 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'

Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.

> A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."

A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri something ki." Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean you can't describe it. Children are also very likely to just sketch out a picture of what they remember, even if it's incorrect, and you can usually figure that out.

[mveety]

> Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.

You're missing his point and English is a crappy example because it's spelling is an unmitigated disaster. For example, if you can read and vocalize the Greek alphabet, you can just ask someone what "νόστιμο φαγητό"* means because you can vocalize it. You only need basic knowledge of the alphabet there. Where as with Chinese/Japanese you need to have a good base of characters to be able to potentially vocalize an unknown character which requires much more work than learning a new alphabet.

(* νόστιμο φαγητό means delicious food)

[FabHK]

Similarly in Spanish, which has great consistency, in that if you see a word written, you pretty much know how to pronounce it, and vice versa. English is pretty bad in that department, but still much better than Chinese.

While many Chinese characters have a phonetic component (in addition to a component related to the meaning), it rarely corresponds exactly to the current pronunciation (in Mandarin).

Furthermore, you can very rarely conjure the right character out of pronunciation and and some aspect of the meaning.