Spanish is better than English, but it's nowhere near that regular. There are three different ways to pronounce "x", wild dialectal variations in "ll" and "c", etc.

The rules are very clear on when those are used though, you are not really arguing the original point imo. What are the dialectical variations in "ll" and "c"?

(B2-ish Spanish learner here but) "ll" is pronounced in at least three variants that I know of: "y", "j", and something between "sh" and "ch". E.g. "llama" might be pronounced like (in English writing) "yama", "zhama", or "shama". The last one really threw me for a while; it's super common in Argentina at least.

I spent time in the "Rio de la Plata" area in the late 1970s, mainly Montevideo, and learned rioplatense Spanish, and would use the ZH sound as in "meaSure" for Y/LL letters in "playa" and "calle".

In the last 40 years I've spent mostly in the USA I rarely have heard Uruguayan/Argentinian Spanish in person or in media, but was surprised to hear Messi and others in recent interviews use SH as in "puSH" for the Y/LL, this apparent has been a generational shift in that area, first in Argentina and then Uruguay. I'd sound old-fashioned if I were to go back to Montevideo these days.

I see what you mean. I think you should stick to one form and learn by difference or you could quickly get lost.

"ll" in standard spanish is a strong english "y".

However, in spanish argentinian from the area of Buenos Aires (but not the argentinian Córdoba, which sounds more like colombian spanish) it is "sh", being that s something like a mix in-between of "j" and "s" + h as in "she" but the sound is a bit different.

Without being able to record some sound I cannot express it better but I am sure you can find something around. Javier Milei, the president, has such an accent.

AFAIK "ll" can also be the palatalized "l" sound in some dialects, i.e. in the same relationship to regular "l" as "ñ" is to "n". Indeed, this is the original pronunciation from which all others have diverged.

as has been stated many times in this thread, the rules are also very clear in English. They just aren't taught.

I think that must have been within one dialect. If you include all dialects of English (Scottish, Irish, Australian, Singaporian, Indian, American, etc. etc.) I'm sure you have a lot more than 43 phonemes.

In any case, her point wasn't to give a lecture on linguistics, but to impress upon the parents how complicated English really is to learn to read.

The dialects I can buy it but I think the x has only two ways? It is a very regular language from the point of view of the written mapping to sound.

x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, like the English “sh” in Xcaret, like s in xenofobia and like English “x” in extremo.

The first two are not productive now in normal Spanish words: they are only used in old spellings that have irregularly been retained, and in loanwords from indigenous languages. But they do exist.

Well, yes. I was speaking about standard Spanish from Spain.

Xenofobia is an s, yes, and excursión is "ks" In fsct, Méjico is the traditional way to write Mexico in Spanish grom Spain until it was accepted the other form a few years ago. I still write "Méjico" myself.

Since less than 10% of Spanish speakers are from Spain, there’s no reason to assume you were specifically talking about that one country when referring to the Spanish language in general.

And anyway, as you point out, even in Spain the form México is accepted now.

I thought it is perfectly reasonable to talk about spanish from Spsin the same you talk about English from England.

After all, it is where they come from originally and have their own spelling (colour vs color, etc.)

An x in standard spanish has always been the two sounds I told you and that mexican deviation is specific to Mexico.

Yes, it is over 100 million speakers but I was still assuming the root language in its original place as the reference. Sorry if I did not express it correctly.

I get your point, but FWIW, México is not a Mexican deviation; it's just an older Spanish spelling. E.g. Jiménez was once spelled Ximénez and there are probably lots of other examples.

The "root language spoken in its original place" absolutely did pronounce X like modern J.

True, I forgot that detail. Ximenez did exist in fact and I forgot that. So it must be that.

Dialects are different since they are still internally consistent.

> phonemes (sounds the mouth makes)

This isn't entirely correct. A distinct sound that the mouth makes is a "phone". A phoneme is almost always a group of several phones - allophones - that native language speakers perceive as a single sound. Another way to phrase it is that if you change one phoneme to another one, it makes a different word (possibly a non-existing one, but regardless the native speakers would consider it distinct), but changing from one phone to another doesn't change the word.

For example, in English, the phoneme /t/ has allophones [t], [tʰ], [ɾ], or [ʔ] depending on context. OTOH [ɾ] is a distinct phoneme in Spanish, and [ʔ] is a distinct phoneme in Arabic.

Unfortunately these two are often confused, so one should be careful with such counts and comparing them - it's not uncommon when people count phonemes in their native language, but phones in other languages (when those phones sound distinct to them).

This can also vary significantly from dialect to dialect, since one very common thing in language evolution is for two similar phonemes to collapse into a single one while retaining the original distinction as allophones. For English, in particular, the number of phonemes varies a lot between American and British English (with the latter having more distinctions).

Spanish "maps" very nicely but even Spanish isn't exactly 1:1

- /k/ can be written both c and qu, and k where it occasionally appears in the language (e.g. kilo) - and the u in qu is silent.

- /s/ can be written c, s, and z, though stress rules are different for c and z.

- r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.

- At least in Mexican Spanish: The "ua" sound can be spelled ua or oa (e.g. Michoacan, Oaxaca) - and also the breathy sound of j can also be written with an x.

- d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)

Not an issue with /s/ in Iberian Spanish. Once you have 'distinción', most ortography errors I've read overseas plummet down there.

qu: the u is always silent and qu is followed by i or e. It is still a systematic way of reading. It is like gue and gui, you pronounce as in "singer" the "ge", the u is mute. If you want to pronounce the u, as in pingüino, you set the diaeresis.

The stress rules, to the best of my knowledge, is very systemaic (not 100% but I would say "almost" at least for the words in use). Even the stress rules are very uniform.

> r and rr are distinct sounds but r = rr at the beginning of words, I think.

This is still systematic reading. At the start of a word it is the strong one, yes. And when it is preceded by a consonant, such as in "enredar" (that is strong r). There is no exception of any kind here.

> d has a sound a little like English voiced-th at the end of words (e.g. juventud)

That is some dialects in some areas. We pronounce a clean d at the end in my area (around Valencia). It is also the correct, standard way to do it for spanish. The other is a deviation existing in León, for example.