the existence of spelling bees is such a condemnation of English orthography

like our language is so fucked up we made a competition where native speakers try to spell words

@kasdeya
They do spelling bees in Portuguese, it's pretty hard too. French is even harder than English, and Italian is fairly easy, but I don't know if it's a thing there.

@kasdeya in china instead of spelling bees they have contests to see who can find a character in a dictionary first

that feels even worse somehow

@kasdeya For Dutch there is a contest on TV/Radio where the contestants meet in the Senate chamber, and everyone has to copy down a text being read out by the presenter. The one with the fewest spelling mistakes wins. (This is an international competition shared between the Netherlands and Belgium. The winner is almost always a Flemish contestant.)

Dutch spelling has a few weird cases, for example the past tense marker being a -t or -d based on the sound preceding it, but this difference is pronounced only in a few verb forms. But most of the challenge comes from spelling loan words inserted sans gêne into the text, the author going as wild as a przewalski horse.

It has happened once in history that they got zero mistakes:

https://archief.ntr.nl/grootdictee/2014/06/03/dicteetekst-2002/index.html