Native speaker here (American). I can read it, it's not necessarily difficult but it's much slower. I would not voluntarily read any book or long form text written in this script. This feels very much the same as those experiments where the words contain all the correct letters, and the first and last are in the right position, but the rest are in jumbled order. For example, "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch" vs "According to a research" [0]. It's readable, but I hate it lol. EDIT: that said, I do recognize that it could be a useful tool for helping people that may not be native speakers or perhaps have some learning disability, or perhaps even a way to better encode text for text-to-speech uses or other accessibility purposes. I personally do not care for it, but I'm not against it.
it's not hard to read for native speakers, but you have to go slowly, where ordinary reading is very fast. reminds me of the experiment that shows you can read words with all the letters scrambled if the first and last letter are not part of the scramble https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let... I assume that works in any language? but that "reads" fairly quickly whereas this one here for me at least is a little slower
> is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?
For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance.
I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.
That's not my experience from the short samples in the article, I could get the correct meaning out of all of them at a glance. The only slowdown was in returning to the text after the initial read, to try to puzzle out the exact definitions for the new letters. I'm pretty sure that I could read English in this alphabet almost as fast as the normal one even with no practice.
A contrast only by familiarity. I imagine the difference would vanish very quickly.
As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is how most languages work. English by comparison has no consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because it never went anywhere
I guess I wrote UK English until I came to the US a decade ago and spell check fixes a lot of those issues for me. I could imagine that’s something similar here where it seems the mother has no problem reading, but when writing she seems to confuse the weird spelling they taught her.
As a radical spelling reform it may not have been so bad, as a pedagogical tool for graduating to "real" English it's not hard to see how it would have been a disaster.
