The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.
And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.
Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.
Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that’s standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don’t exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!
Masha Bell has analyzed 7000 common words and found that about 1/2 cause spelling and pronunciation difficulties and about 1/3 cause decoding difficulties.
(from wikipedia)
The saving grace with French is that when you read a word, you can (almost always) divine its pronunciation immediately. I’m not saying a reform isn’t in order, as not pronouncing half the letters in a word seems kinda stupid, but in my opinion English is several orders of magnitude worse. My spouse, who practically learned English through me while we lived in an Anglophone country for almost a decade and is quite fluent, still can’t spell worth a shit.
And even us native speakers have to guess the correct pronunciation of words we haven’t heard before, which is insane. When l was young I was a voracious reader, but having never heard many of the more uncommon words spoken before, I often internalised the wrong way of saying them.
Fuck it, I’m on board. Let’s gut this thing and start fresh.
Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that’s standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don’t exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!