Johnny Novgorod said:
I don't know about logographic writing systems like Japanese but surely any language based on the Greek/Latin alphabet is going to have some version of a spelling bee used to teach proper spelling & writing.
I think what OP believes to be 'special' about English and it's rather haphazard relationship with phonetic spelling (or rather, a lack thereof), is the somewhat free and loose 'rules' that are drawn from historic standards developed and agreed upon at different points in time by different groups of people with little (read: no) effort by central government to integrate or standardise anything ('correct' spelling in English, with very few exceptions, came about thanks to consensus, not by rule, and while this is true for many languages, the blurred lines of English's linguistic heritage make said consensus an exercise in madness). Which causes crap like: tough; though; thought; and through, all of which draw the 'ough' letter cluster from largely different etymological roots.
ObsidianJones said:
I was actually thinking he meant ideographs from Asian Languages. But I could have been wrong.
'Spelling' in (East-)Asian ('cos that's my point of reference) is variously pointless and impractical:
Vietnamese uses Latin with heavy application of diacritics and is entirely phonetic.
Thai (and by association Lao) is written using syllabic characters (best analogy are kana from Japanese) which also infer tone, which, consequently, is entirely phonetic.
Tagalog (AFAIK) uses Latin script with diacritics and is, again, entirely phonetic.
Korean hangul is entirely phonetic and hanja (more below) aren't used for the most part to the extent that 'spelling bees' would not be practical given the scarcity of characters used by the general population.
Japanese hiragana and katakana are also entirely phonetic and kanji have a similar problem as above Korean hanja (again, more below), if to a much lesser extent.
And now for the kicker: Chinese (hanzi); and by extension hanja and kanji. From a practical standpoint, these are impractical to vocally spell. Seriously, how do you 'spell' 輛 for example? Say 'vehicle-two (meas.)'?(!) Saying how you'd write the character by stipulating stroke placement and order is dumb (go on, spell 龜 in that way, I dare you!). But OK, perhaps instead of saying, how's about writing? Part of the challenge of spelling bees is to provide words that the participants would not be expected to actually know, but by analysing their own vocabulary, spelling conventions and educated guesswork have fair odds of spelling correctly. This cannot be (reasonably) applied to Chinese/Japanese/Korean. In a linguistic vacuum, how a character is pronounced (be it hanzi/kanji/hanja, and don't even get me started on kunyomi vs onyomi (not to mention the multitude of onyomi readings) or the various Chinese dialectal differences in reading hanzi) has literally zero bearing on its meaning (like... across the world, how many ways are there to pronounce this most simple of characters: 一 ? More to the point, how are these pronunciations phonetically related (even just in Chinese or just in Japanese)?). Worse yet, every character in Chinese (irrespective of how complicated its script and definition is) is monosyllabic while in Japanese it can be mono-, di- or even tri-syllabic but the syllable count has, again, literally zero bearing on anything else to do with the character in question (can't speak for hanja, so won't). Further, character construction can be done in one of four ways (by literal ideography, by phonology, by definition built on a previous character, or by character loan), any combination of which can be relevant for a particular character. Consequently, for a character that a 'spelling bee' participant has not been educated in, providing a contextual sentence demonstrating usage of the character is virtually useless, as constructing a character from existing vocabulary is just not a thing.
*dramatic shrug*
