How is English easy???

Ajay Dangwal

May 4, 2015 11:18 AM

It's not Easy but It can be fun.

May 4, 2015

English spelling is torture for native English speakers, too. We learn to read by a mixture of "sight reading" (recognizing a word visually as a whole) and "phonics" ("try 'sounding it out,'" the teacher says, if we don't recognize it by sight).

Spelling checkers were developed at almost the same time as word processors--just as soon as computers had enough storage to hold a dictionary. I wonder if people who use phonetically spelled languages really need them.

There have been occasional efforts to reform English spelling but they haven't come to anything. The reason for some of the spelling differences between U.S. and British spelling is that the U.S. lexicographer, Noah Webster, just decided to phoneticize the spelling of a few words here and there. He didn't go far enough to help, he went just far enough to hurt by creating those national spelling differences.

Every year a national organization conducts national "spelling bees" in which schoolchildren compete for scholarships by spelling words like "chrysanthemum" and "autochthonous."

It all seems crazy, but I don't expect to see English spelling reformed any more than I expect to see the calendar reformed. (I expected the United States to adopt the "metric system" decades ago, but even that hasn't happened).

May 6, 2015

If you begin to think about English the same way you see your daily life in your native tongue, then you can see taht it's the same as any other language. Lots of times we forget that we are all the same as human beings, adn therefore speak about similar subjects such as the weather, memories, present daily life, future plans, and our ideas about life (which can sometimes be harder to follow in another language. With all that being said, learning how to say words and make it comprehensible is the only thing that you are actually doing, because you have already learned how to be human and make conversation. :)

May 5, 2015