Spanish is the one I'm familiar with and there are a bunch of collisions in pronunciations like b/v and h/j (which are sometimes discernable but often aren't) along with a fair number of silent letters.
In Spanish B and V sounds exactly the same. H and J are strictly different. H is the only silent letter.
Let me remind you that I was answering to your comment where you say:
...read signs and essays aloud without having the faintest idea of what they're saying.
This can be done just learning the independent sound of each letter and the six exceptions that I mentioned.
Graphic accent rules are a bit more complex, but we also learn them by the time we're seven or eight years, so we can use in our writing. They're not essential for reading.
The person I was responding to said that German can be read without knowing the meaning, unlike Spanish. That's not correct.
Depends on accent. Some regions do diferenciate.
Maybe because, as I wrote in a previous comment, they speak another language that does have different sounds.
But again: it's irrelevant for a foreigner learning to read standard Spanish. When you learn English they won't teach you cockney, they teach you some standard pronuntiation.
> Spanish is the one I'm familiar with and there are a bunch of collisions in pronunciations like b/v and h/j (which are sometimes discernable but often aren't)
That doesn't sound right. What variety of Spanish are you familiar with that sometimes distinguishes B from V?
Exactly, there are none. Some persons make them a little different because they also speak other languages, like French or English where they're different. There's no problem wiht that, but it's not needed either.
This video discussing the v in Latin is interesting, and mentions b/v in Spanish. But watching this gives some insight on how these sounds merged over time, and has interesting clips of dialects of other Romance languages where this effect occurs to a greater or lesser extent. The comments are well worth reading too.
