How the English Language Is Holding Kids Back

[Chris_]

How the English Language Is Holding Kids Back

Johnny in Topeka can’t read, but Janne in Helsinki is effortlessly finishing his storybooks. Such a disparity may be expected by now, but the reason might come as a surprise: It probably has much less to do with teaching style and quality than with language. Simply put, written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. It’s like making children from around the world complete an obstacle course to fully participate in society but requiring the English-speaking participants to wear blindfolds.

Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks. But consider this: English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds. For example, "cat," "kangaroo," "chrome," and "queue" all start with the same sound, and "eight" and "ate" sound identical. Meanwhile, "it" doesn’t sound like the first syllable of "item," for instance, and "cough" doesn’t rhyme with either "enough," "through," "furlough" or "bough." Even some identically spelled words, such as "tear," can be pronounced differently and mean different things. 

Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. No one knows for sure, but the Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world’s most irregularly spelled language.

The Atlantic

If you're illiterate, it isn't your fault. 

[Big Dog]

English.

It ain't for pussies.

[Lacarnut]

Masha....keep your stupidity in the UK.

[thundley4]

Yeah, no. I'm thinking that Chinese is a much more complicated language and their students excel even when they learn English to go to US colleges.

[SVPete]

Yeah, no. I'm thinking that Chinese is a much more complicated language and their students excel even when they learn English to go to US colleges.

I may be oversimplifying more than a bit, but languages like Chinese (actually several dialects) and Japanese have character sets of something on the order of 2000 characters, each representing one of the usable syllables of the language. It's at once limiting and challenging most people's memory. IOW those 2000 syllables are all that is "possible" within the language. At the same time, memorizing even the several hundred most frequently used characters is a daunting task! The Japanese have been sidestepping both issues with the use of a .......... phonetic character set, with which they can form existing words or form newly coined or imported words. And for a Westerner accustomed to a phonetic character set, Chinese is among the 10 most difficult languages to learn.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Yeeeeahhhh, no.  Little Vjarni or whatever his name is will grow up speaking a language that is a cut-off survivor of a completely different language family than the Slavic and Germanic ones used in the surrounding countries, spoken daily only in his own country, and will have to learn English, Russian, or German if he wants to get a job that requires travel or has much upside potential at all.  Little Johnny in Kansas is mainly held back by a culture that minimized the value of character, challenge, initiative, independence, and hard work, not by his language.

[Big Dog]

Little Johnny in Kansas is mainly held back by a culture that minimized the value of character, challenge, initiative, independence, and hard work, not by his language.

Spoken like a man who's been to Topeka.

[DumbAss Tanker]

Spoken like a man who's been to Topeka.

As a matter of fact, I have.

 

[Big Dog]

As a matter of fact, I have.

 

There is an Ebonics dialect unique to Topeka, and Topeka also has a well-developed wigger culture.

The drivers also hate motorcycles, to the point of targeting us. No shit.

[MrsSmith]

I've always heard that English is the easiest to learn to speak, one of the hardest to learn to write.

As I am not multi-lingual, I can't say for sure, but my mother spoke 8 languages and she agreed.

[SVPete]

Yeeeeahhhh, no.  Little Vjarni or whatever his name is will grow up speaking a language that is a cut-off survivor of a completely different language family than the Slavic and Germanic ones used in the surrounding countries, spoken daily only in his own country, and will have to learn English, Russian, or German if he wants to get a job that requires travel or has much upside potential at all.  Little Johnny in Kansas is mainly held back by a culture that minimized the value of character, challenge, initiative, independence, and hard work, not by his language.

Finnish is indeed the largest of a very small family of languages. Related languages/dialects are spoken in Estonia and parts of Norway. OTOH, in some parts of Finland residents' "first language" is Swedish. If the "strength" of Finnish is that it is well defined and internally consistent, its weakness is its insularity.

If the "weakness" of English is the inconsistencies that come from having so many roots and contributions - Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hindi (and probably more) - its strength is its openness and English speakers' willingness the adopt good and useful words and ideas from other languages and cultures. Though the learning curve for English may be a bit steeper, especially when first learning to read and write (at an age when learning languages is less difficult), the "payoff" is also far greater (and, IMO, starts in late elementary grades or high school). An adult Finn or Chinese or Japanese or Korean would face a worse learning curve in trying to learn English or French or German.

[sargentodiaz]

This is the biggest pile of male bovine excrement I've ever read!

English is only as hard or easy as you make it.

If schools would revert to what they did years ago and require students to learn either French, German, Latin, or Spanish, learning English would be far simpler.

Having had six months of intensive training in German did a thousand times more to help my understanding of English than all my 12 years of schooling.