Can non-Indians win spelling bee? Beats me too, How can Indians learn million languages of their own and learn English additionally to an extent of winning spelling bee? Apparently they do, with “yemm..wo..wo and then yenn”.
If you look at other side of this, Spelling bee cannot be conducted in any Indian languages. Only English (I think) have this privilege. None of them have this “disability” of “not spelling what is pronounced” and “not pronouncing what is written”. In other words, almost all Indian languages (with has script e.g Hindi), any word can be pronounced only one way and written too, no ambiguity. I heard rest of the Asian languages are designed this way too, Arabic, Chinese etc.
Anyways, enjoy this Young Turks video on latest spelling bee.
The Bach 
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and few languages are restricted in their pronunciation. with regard to the spelling in indian languages, i think the words can be spelt syllable-by-syllable than letter-by-letter as is the case in english. Well, that makes it too easy then.
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It should be, right? Easiness is how quickly a fresher can pick up the language? Its basic grammar and exceptional cases for Grammar rules. In case of English large effort goes for memorising spellings of each word.. which do no abide any general rules..
Even now I have big problem in spelling area.. Thanks goodness there is spell checker 🙂
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a person trying to learn a new language is different with one who participates in a spelling-bee. i guess if one has studied and spoken the language since birth, then it’s not very difficult for that person to spell out words.
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