Spanish vowels are unionized. They each do one and only one job. There's a tiny exception for the letter U when it's hanging out with Q and E or G and E, wherein it gets to take a break and do nothing. What it means is that my husband is incapable of pronouncing the difference between bit and beat, fit and feet because the short I doesn't exist in Spanish. Latinos are also almost universally deaf to the difference between its/it's and is. I was in a spectacularly hair-pulling discussion with a friend for whom I translated a document and he wanted to fight me over every use of it's because he will swear on any religious tome you care to provide that Americans say "Is good that is raining outside because I don't want to go out." I talked myself blue explaining the bizarre neurosis English has concerning grammatical subjects and how we'll create "dummy subjects" like "It is raining" to fill the need.
As a writer that is not a native english speaker, I can tell you without a doubt that language represents culture. I am an introverted person. English allows me to write fiction, as I cannot write any in my native language, I get shy and self-conscious.
I think it's 'cause the Japanese insist on relying on Katakana to help them sound out English words, and then they're not really reading the English anymore but their Japanese script, which means it's never going to be correct. Vowel sounds just don't translate across languages I found. It's especially misleading between European languages because you see the same alphabet and then you're like, "Oh I don't have to pay too much attention to this!" And sure, you learn the two or three extra letters in the target language, but that's about it. But it turns out vowels are quite different across languages I think.
Yeah, like, you learn Swedish and then start to get the hang of the differences between kärlek and räcka but then it all just falls apart. -Wait what do you mean all the ä's aren't pronounced the same? -Oh, don't worry, just use the same sound you'd use in the word sitter. (=to sit) -I'm sorry, what? You mean the same letter that's in ärt? But in writing you don't put an ä there, you put e? -That's right. Now, remember, our o, isn't your o like in ostentious. That's when you want to use the letter å -O...kay, so what do I do with o? -It's basically your u. -your o is my u? How do you pronounce your u? -well it's like your y, except not quite -oh fuck åff.
Not just vowels, at least not with certain language comparisons. For sake of argument, let's assume a scale of zero to ten, where zero = "I understand this with no trouble at all" and ten = "Welcome to Earth, we don't have universal translators yet." I speak Spanish and can understand spoken Brazilian Portuguese at like a three or four, but written Portuguese is much easier to parse. The written orthography is much, much closer between the two languages than the resultant phonemes that get uttered out loud. I can read it at like a two.
At least it's more or less consistent, it just looks like a mess at first! Unlike in some languages... (I'm looking at you English, and your tough, bough, through, and though)
And then you have Czechs proudly proclaiming that the most difficult aspect of their language is knowing when to spell a word with i and when with y, because they are pronounced almost exactly the same and then when you tell them how wrong they are, they're genuinely offended. Then you have spelling bee competitions where we ask little 8 year olds to spell words like "occasionally"...
Now I just feel like you're talking about Mandarin vs Cantonese. Spoken, my understanding of it would be at around eight or nine. Written in traditional Chinese, my understanding - assuming it's at my literacy level of Chinese anyway - would be at zero. Written in simplified Chinese, probably two or three. (sorta depends on how many simplified characters are present)