The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Yavernoxia]

That's a very interesting experiment.  I should try a similar one: post an audio clip in some language and ask for a volunteer who does not know how to write that language to try to write down the sounds they hear, using whatever spelling system they chooses, and then see how consistent the result was.  Namely, if they always wrote the same word in the same way.

To better approximate the dictation scenario of the Chinese Theory, the volunteer ideally should be somehow familiar with the spoken language, even partly understand it, but they have no idea of its official spelling or even the nuances of its phonetics.  Maybe playing Portuguese to an Italian speaker, Dutch to an English speaker, Czech to a Polish speaker...

All the best, --stolfi

This would have to be done one word at a time and clearly to have any chance. I just brought up a video in portuguese to test (I cannot understand it, but am familiar with its ties to spanish and other romance languages so i get a word here and there) and it's a complete non starter to even try to write it down. 

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I got to about 20 seconds in, and i've been repeating this over and over at 0.5x speed, and its almost completely impossible. Here is my text, does it hold any actual information still? (do not laugh at how obviously horrible this is)

omdilia trente dewes unyos sot brazil de terut sao paolo maz veskiturzian skoviv un paranaon je fustudar uuh furomacum proffesor je portugues espanyol nao apremereves kuv ... uduguay jevinu truz vez, ee kiminkun tenten viriki

and the auto-transcript:

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o meu nome é Marília eu tenho 32 anos sou do Brasil do interior de São Paulo mas faz 14 anos que eu vivo no Paraná onde eu fui estudar H me formei como professora de português e espanhol não é a primeira vez que eu venho para Uruguai já vim outras vezes e o que me encanta tanto em vir aqui

This is really interesting because, as an Italian who studied Spanish in middle school and only has a basic understanding of it, I can confidently say that I understand roughly 70–80% of what the girl in the video is saying without any problems, even though I’ve never studied or really had any exposure to either Brazilian or European Portuguese.  What’s your native language? What other languages do you speak? Just curious about it