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AC2BHAPPY t1_je6kkjm wrote

... do they really not have spelling competitions in other languages

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antiquemule t1_je6pez5 wrote

In France we used to have a yearly dictation competition on prime time television - “the golden dictionaries”. You could tag along at home to see how you compared with the best.

Afterwards, Members of the very serious French academy would explain the obscure grammar rules that had to be followed to get the right answer.

Almost nobody got 100%. Riveting stuff!

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pewpewpewouch t1_je6swkl wrote

We do the same in Holland and Belgium. I never got a 100% score.. pretty difficult usually.

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Neikius t1_je77h32 wrote

Well it is probably the fault of the french that the English use this atrocious spelling. Would have to check tho.

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wombey12 t1_je6wo0q wrote

Ah yes, Les Immortels. Learnt about them through a Tom Scott video; they sound very, very protective when it comes to their language.

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noname942 t1_je6l8wk wrote

no

at least not in most of them

Sounds match to letters almost perfectly so it's just not a problem.

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imnotonatrain t1_je6ue9n wrote

Gnome. Knife. Dumb. Design. Knight

Ok, English. Go home, you're drunk

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CarsonOrSanders t1_je6r8ui wrote

>Sounds match to letters almost perfectly so it's just not a problem.

Yeah okay. Everyone who speaks in every other language knows how to spell every word because the sounds are so perfect.

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noname942 t1_je6w02u wrote

I'm speaking for Czech, Slovak and German, (they're not exactly perfect, but when compared to English... one could say they're very consistent and regular), according to wikipedia it's like that in quite a few languages (they're listing only languages with high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, English is still orders of magnitude behind German and Slovak even if they're not in the list though)

Also, according to wikipedia, spelling bee exists in only 3 languages other than English

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CarsonOrSanders t1_je75fsh wrote

Your own wiki link says the spelling bee in Uganda alone has 10 different languages.

Also Hindi, one of the "3 other languages", is the third most spoken language in the entire world.

I guess what I'm getting at is...you were wrong.

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dragonmp93 t1_je77evg wrote

Well, Chinesse and Hindi and the most spoken languages because China and India are 1/3 of the entire humanity.

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pewpewpewouch t1_je6spcg wrote

We have a National Dictation on tv in Netherlands and Belgium. Celebs are in it as well. But this is very different from the spelling bee, also pretty difficult.

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Epic1024 t1_je6qte2 wrote

In Ukrainian letters in a word sound the same way they would sound individually, I imagine it's the same way for many other languages

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ok_my_friend t1_je6xszn wrote

Dictations are more popular because they're way harder. There are more words and you can make punctuation mistakes.

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tomal95 t1_je76q82 wrote

I don't think they're really a thing in the English speaking world that isn't America. I've never had or heard of one in the UK.

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araralc t1_je77prz wrote

They do. I speak Brazilian Portuguese, which has way more uniform rules regarding spelling versus pronunciation, but there were spelling competitions. Idk how those are going nowadays. But they can be very easy if you are fluent in the language conventions. So usually who participates is on the younger side

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