Topics: Linguistics- Language Learning
I very very very commonly find people that are learning a foreign language put its written form before its spoken one.
In my experience, that’s not how it should be analysed. Writing systems are a relatively recent innovation. It’s the written form of the language thah wraps around the spoken one, not the other way around.
For instance, instead of asking “why is this (written) word pronounced like so?”, I find it better to ask “why is this (spoken) word written like so?“.
It’s not that a grapheme represents a specific phoneme, syllable, morpheme or word, but rather, it’s these things that are represented by a grapheme.
It’s best to learn a word in its spoken form then relating it to its written form.