This really seems like excusing the underperforming education system in US and cultural glorification of language bastardization. Every language has some areas that are difficult to grasp and English is one of the easier languages, as most people who have learned more than two foreign languages (including English, of course) can tell.
I too am not sure I buy the argument. While Danish has a institution 'controlling' the language, Danish is far more irregular than English is. This is also hindered by Danish having 18 basic vowels (most of any European language), although it has 9 (+4 from English) letters to describe the vowels. But even so, they overlap.
Despite Danish's inconsistencies, problems and - some might say - generally awfulness (which I personally like!), Denmark has a 99% literacy rate.[0]
Everyone seems to agree that schools are garbage. Why doesn't someone do something about it?
Also, this is off topic, but a decent place to ask: Why are there no programming classes in schools? (I've heard 'politics' before, but it has never been explained to me.)
English is a foreign language for me and I think you're absolutely right. Every language has tough parts, but English is by far the easiest I've seen. Excusing the lack of proper education like that is just silly.
This is counter to all the anecdotes I've heard all my life (from everyday people to English majors) about the difficulty of English. I grew up and hang around American monolinguals.
By the way, it's not like other languages magically happened to avoid the same problems - from what I see looking at 19th century European text, they had the same issues that English still has.
Most of those languages have made a spelling reform or two that did exactly the proposed radical changes to spelling of words, including common words, to make spelling mostly match pronounciation.
The Atlantic article discusses the shenanigans of Belgian printers inserting unnecessary letters into words, changing e.g. "frend" to "friend". Spelling Reform 1 (SR1), a failed effort from the late '60s and '70s, would have addressed that and more.
Noah Webster -- of Merriam-Webster Dictionary fame -- spearheaded early American spelling reform. This is why American English writes "favorite" instead of "favourite", "center" instead of "centre", "catalog" instead of "catalogue", etc.
Other languages don't just have spelling reforms, but they also have institutions which periodically update the spelling of words.
For example, in Spanish, "Iraq" is spelled "Irak"—but only as of 2010! The change came with justifications: that it avoids the use of "q" outside of the digraph "qu", and that the terminal "k" is nowadays more familiar in words borrowed from other languages.
Japanese is a famously difficult language, but in the past century and a half, they've had multiple reforms which standardized and eliminated characters—there are more changes in the works, but it looks like they'll get new characters, such as "gaiji".
My Consultant said when I was diagnosed with dyslexia that in countrys like Italy where the langauges are very regular there is less diagnosed dyslexia as the language makes some tasks esier.
I don't really think that native English speakers have a problem in knowing how a certain sequence of characters should be pronounced. This kind of problem is usually typical of people (of any native language) with high levels of literacy - it happens when a substantial part of their vocabulary comes from reading books rather than oral communication (be it person to person or tv/ cinema).
To me, the problem of native English speakers seems to be that they are often unable to write their native language well enough not to come across as uneducated people.
I am an Italian living in an English speaking country. I never had any problem in remembering the correct spelling of English words, and I believe it's because I can read them with the Italian pronunciation (in which spelling and sound are perfectly matching). It's probably much easier for the brain to remember a sequence of sounds rather than a sequence of symbols. So I wonder if anybody has ever tried, as a teaching tool, to teach children to read English with an "alphabetic" pronunciation that associates exactly one sound to each letter. Assigning to every word a "written" sound on top of the "spoken" sound could help in remembering the correct spelling.
Because of the different accents, vowel sounds are pronounced differently in different native English countries and regions of countries, so associating one letter to a sound is only possible if you chose a particular accent, e.g. U.S. Great Lakes, U.S. Kentucky, or U.K. Manchester.
English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. [...] That’s bad news for English-speaking societies, which represent about 6 percent of the world’s population
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.
I've been learning English since I was six, then went to a British university, completed my degree and now I live and work in the UK. My proficiency level would be easily rated at C1/C2 level - I am completely fluent in both reading and writing.
And yet, I still find words in English that I simply don't know how to pronounce. I can give them a try, but unless I've heard someone else say them, I have no idea. That's a huge problem with English and I know that a lot of people who learn English as a their second language struggle with it.
I have heard (from a Linguistics student) that it takes an adult native speaker of French / German / Spanish / Italian (European languages etc etc) about 4000 hours to reach basic competency in English, and the same going the other way.
Going from/to the European languages to/from Japanese or Chinese (etc etc) take about 8000 hours to reach basic competency.
>Ultimately, about one out of every five English speakers are functionally illiterate, meaning they "cannot read or write well enough for everyday literacy needs," Bell said.
This is an utterly surprising statistic. Do they mean people who aren't native speakers?
Having lived in the UK for many years, I never came across anyone who couldn't read for daily needs. How would you even use public transport?
I'd be interested to hear what the definition of "everyday literacy needs" is, because I've had a similar experience in the US. Unless there is a large concentration of people who are actually mostly illiterate in rural areas, this statistic must be misleading.
Perhaps it's the circles you move in - I've come across UK native adults who struggle to read basic texts. I'd peg it at more like 1 in 50 : but that might be an over-statement depending on what you consider "everyday literacy needs".
Public transport: You ask a neighbour what bus number, or your work tells you to get bus X, or you ask the driver "does this bus go to ..." and remember the number for future trips, etc..
I don't know many people, but I do know (not personally, he's in my school) who can't read. When we are reading out loud it takes him somewhere around a second per word.
20% seems really high to me, but I'm also in school and don't really know anyone else, so if someone can't read in school there must be more somewhere outside of school. But I would like to see that study.
I think it is worth it to try this but it will likely go the way of Esperanto. English really is NOT especially challenging compared to other languages. And as anyone who travels in Europe will realize, there seems to be little problem with people learning it as a second language.
I'd say that's not so much because of whether it's easy or hard to learn or not, but because the vast majority of media (mostly movies and TV, but nowadays also the internet) is in English, often subtitled. Some countries dub it (like Germany), so the level of English there is often lower.
It's amount of exposure, clear and simple. Replace English TV with Spanish or Finnish or maybe Korean and you'd probably have the same effect. That said though, English is relatively close to western-European languages; similar origins and influences, so the barrier to learn English in addition to a western European language is lower than learning Russian or Korean and, arguably, Spanish or Italian.
I really don't understand why educators persist in trying to teach English reading and writing phonetically. It's not a phonetic language, so surely it is harmful to pretend that it is and lie to children about it.
Children learning Chinese can learn the Chinese character set through rote, and there's no reason why we can't be honest and accept that English learners have to do the same, too.
When my friend married a Hungarian woman, she brought her teenage sons to the US with her. I told them that I wanted to apologize in advance for two things: English spelling, and the Imperial measuring system. They were amused. While they all knew some English, the boys, not surprisingly, have learned more quickly than their mother.
What would the normative pronunciation be, and how long would it remain stable?
And I find this very strange: 'On the other hand, the American concept of "reading level" doesn’t even exist in countries with more regular spelling systems.' Surely there is more to reading levels than knowing how the words sound.
English is my native language, but I spent many years achieving fluency in French and that included extensive study of culture. I achieved a degree in English literature so I also know the background of the language (re: oops everybody who speaks Latin is dead - thanks plague!). English is by and large the most complex "cultural dumping ground" of the world. American English is incredibly diverse.
What bothers me so much is that the cultural issues surrounding language are far more complex than the English language itself. Citing Finland or South Korea is bullshit because they are very homogeneous societies and cultures. Toss in a bunch of Central Americans trying to learn Korean as a second language, or Gold Coast Africans trying to learn Finnish and show me what that study looks like. Bad, that's what. Why? Because those KSL and FSL students will be on the outside of the culture, and be dealing with literacy not just in speaking/reading/writing, but of adapting to a world that they do not know.
Boston English isn't the same as Mississippi English which isn't the same as San Diego English. Basic literacy, spelling, is the glue that allows people to move between cultures within the same language. That's why slang is so amazing in American English - it's all the influences and rule breaking that the language can stand...which, as my studies have shown, is one of the major criticisms against French as a language and culture. It's interesting to me and really broadened my worldview.
Now, after throwing the notion and explanations from this article in the trash, I do have an alternate issue that must be addressed within English learning. The day that "technology" renders writing by hand obsolete - which is a frequent argument I've heard put forth by parents and lazy students (Who writes cursive anymore? Why do I have to learn division when I have a calculator?) - students will be cheating their brain development. Why is cursive hard? Because it's forcing mental connections between the linguistic and motor skill areas of the brain. Same goes for working on basic math problems by hand.
Just like taking hits to the head in football, using performance enhancing tools should be evaluated on the basis of maturity of mind having achieved the basic skill set by which the enhancement is dependent. Also, pay sucks in Education and the dynamic of parents/administrators is one that I'm smart enough to avoid. Want smarter kids? Make them work harder.
In term of spelling French is much worse than English. I wonder how they compare in term of education level. My anecdotal experience living and going to school in both England and France as a kid leads me to believe that the level of British primary school is not very high and that basic knowledge in math and reading is introduced slower there.
> In term of spelling French is much worse than English.
Is it? Certainly, multiple sequences of characters map to the same sound: the final vowels in et, est, thé, années, soleil, clef all sound identical (at least to my ear: there may be some subtleties of pronounciaton that escape me).
But from what little study I've done of French, I don't remember the opposite problem being as bad: a given sequence of characters is generally pronounced in one way. So if you come across an unfamiliar French word, you can take a punt at how it's pronounced, and the odds are you'll be correct.
There are of course exceptions, especially with proper nouns (Moët, as in the champagne, is pronounced moe-ETTE not moe-AY, Freddie Mercury not withstanding), but these seem to be fewer than in English.
[+] [-] Aoyagi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Svip|11 years ago|reply
Despite Danish's inconsistencies, problems and - some might say - generally awfulness (which I personally like!), Denmark has a 99% literacy rate.[0]
[0] http://country-facts.findthedata.com/q/66/2395/What-is-the-l... (Although, those data are from 2003.)
[+] [-] sthreet|11 years ago|reply
Also, this is off topic, but a decent place to ask: Why are there no programming classes in schools? (I've heard 'politics' before, but it has never been explained to me.)
[+] [-] jonifico|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterisP|11 years ago|reply
Most of those languages have made a spelling reform or two that did exactly the proposed radical changes to spelling of words, including common words, to make spelling mostly match pronounciation.
[+] [-] emw|11 years ago|reply
This includes English! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refor... covers several major successful (and unsuccessful) English spelling reform efforts since the 16th century.
The Atlantic article discusses the shenanigans of Belgian printers inserting unnecessary letters into words, changing e.g. "frend" to "friend". Spelling Reform 1 (SR1), a failed effort from the late '60s and '70s, would have addressed that and more.
Noah Webster -- of Merriam-Webster Dictionary fame -- spearheaded early American spelling reform. This is why American English writes "favorite" instead of "favourite", "center" instead of "centre", "catalog" instead of "catalogue", etc.
[+] [-] dietrichepp|11 years ago|reply
For example, in Spanish, "Iraq" is spelled "Irak"—but only as of 2010! The change came with justifications: that it avoids the use of "q" outside of the digraph "qu", and that the terminal "k" is nowadays more familiar in words borrowed from other languages.
Japanese is a famously difficult language, but in the past century and a half, they've had multiple reforms which standardized and eliminated characters—there are more changes in the works, but it looks like they'll get new characters, such as "gaiji".
As an English writer I feel left out.
[+] [-] spacecowboy_lon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Udik|11 years ago|reply
I am an Italian living in an English speaking country. I never had any problem in remembering the correct spelling of English words, and I believe it's because I can read them with the Italian pronunciation (in which spelling and sound are perfectly matching). It's probably much easier for the brain to remember a sequence of sounds rather than a sequence of symbols. So I wonder if anybody has ever tried, as a teaching tool, to teach children to read English with an "alphabetic" pronunciation that associates exactly one sound to each letter. Assigning to every word a "written" sound on top of the "spoken" sound could help in remembering the correct spelling.
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vorg|11 years ago|reply
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.
[+] [-] gambiting|11 years ago|reply
And yet, I still find words in English that I simply don't know how to pronounce. I can give them a try, but unless I've heard someone else say them, I have no idea. That's a huge problem with English and I know that a lot of people who learn English as a their second language struggle with it.
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|11 years ago|reply
Going from/to the European languages to/from Japanese or Chinese (etc etc) take about 8000 hours to reach basic competency.
[+] [-] lordnacho|11 years ago|reply
This is an utterly surprising statistic. Do they mean people who aren't native speakers?
Having lived in the UK for many years, I never came across anyone who couldn't read for daily needs. How would you even use public transport?
[+] [-] prophetjohn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
Public transport: You ask a neighbour what bus number, or your work tells you to get bus X, or you ask the driver "does this bus go to ..." and remember the number for future trips, etc..
[+] [-] sthreet|11 years ago|reply
20% seems really high to me, but I'm also in school and don't really know anyone else, so if someone can't read in school there must be more somewhere outside of school. But I would like to see that study.
[+] [-] sirwolfgang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|11 years ago|reply
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
[…]
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chaos
Further notes:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/e/pronounc.htm
[+] [-] angdis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|11 years ago|reply
It's amount of exposure, clear and simple. Replace English TV with Spanish or Finnish or maybe Korean and you'd probably have the same effect. That said though, English is relatively close to western-European languages; similar origins and influences, so the barrier to learn English in addition to a western European language is lower than learning Russian or Korean and, arguably, Spanish or Italian.
[+] [-] efaref|11 years ago|reply
Children learning Chinese can learn the Chinese character set through rote, and there's no reason why we can't be honest and accept that English learners have to do the same, too.
[+] [-] rootbear|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|11 years ago|reply
How's that compare to Chinese? Are Chinese kids at a disadvantage learning to read?
[+] [-] cafard|11 years ago|reply
And I find this very strange: 'On the other hand, the American concept of "reading level" doesn’t even exist in countries with more regular spelling systems.' Surely there is more to reading levels than knowing how the words sound.
[+] [-] 6stringmerc|11 years ago|reply
English is my native language, but I spent many years achieving fluency in French and that included extensive study of culture. I achieved a degree in English literature so I also know the background of the language (re: oops everybody who speaks Latin is dead - thanks plague!). English is by and large the most complex "cultural dumping ground" of the world. American English is incredibly diverse.
What bothers me so much is that the cultural issues surrounding language are far more complex than the English language itself. Citing Finland or South Korea is bullshit because they are very homogeneous societies and cultures. Toss in a bunch of Central Americans trying to learn Korean as a second language, or Gold Coast Africans trying to learn Finnish and show me what that study looks like. Bad, that's what. Why? Because those KSL and FSL students will be on the outside of the culture, and be dealing with literacy not just in speaking/reading/writing, but of adapting to a world that they do not know.
Boston English isn't the same as Mississippi English which isn't the same as San Diego English. Basic literacy, spelling, is the glue that allows people to move between cultures within the same language. That's why slang is so amazing in American English - it's all the influences and rule breaking that the language can stand...which, as my studies have shown, is one of the major criticisms against French as a language and culture. It's interesting to me and really broadened my worldview.
Now, after throwing the notion and explanations from this article in the trash, I do have an alternate issue that must be addressed within English learning. The day that "technology" renders writing by hand obsolete - which is a frequent argument I've heard put forth by parents and lazy students (Who writes cursive anymore? Why do I have to learn division when I have a calculator?) - students will be cheating their brain development. Why is cursive hard? Because it's forcing mental connections between the linguistic and motor skill areas of the brain. Same goes for working on basic math problems by hand.
Just like taking hits to the head in football, using performance enhancing tools should be evaluated on the basis of maturity of mind having achieved the basic skill set by which the enhancement is dependent. Also, pay sucks in Education and the dynamic of parents/administrators is one that I'm smart enough to avoid. Want smarter kids? Make them work harder.
[+] [-] song|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghf|11 years ago|reply
Is it? Certainly, multiple sequences of characters map to the same sound: the final vowels in et, est, thé, années, soleil, clef all sound identical (at least to my ear: there may be some subtleties of pronounciaton that escape me).
But from what little study I've done of French, I don't remember the opposite problem being as bad: a given sequence of characters is generally pronounced in one way. So if you come across an unfamiliar French word, you can take a punt at how it's pronounced, and the odds are you'll be correct.
There are of course exceptions, especially with proper nouns (Moët, as in the champagne, is pronounced moe-ETTE not moe-AY, Freddie Mercury not withstanding), but these seem to be fewer than in English.
[Edited for grammar.]