English Is The Toughest European Language To Learn

Press release on the same study:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/proct02/dyslexics.html

(I looked this up to get a better idea which countries were considered, and which were not.)

Excerpt from a good book on dyslexia by some of the leading researchers in the field:

http://books.google.com/books?id=OTMYM5ijMtMC&pg=PA383&#...

Here's another good link on dyslexia:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/

Here's a link to a forthcoming book with practical advice to parents about dyslexia:

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981...

My overall comments on the submitted article and the claim in its title are:

a) Yes, the English penchant for preserving etymological spellings from multiple languages (especially Norman French) makes learning reading of English more daunting than learning to read a language with a reformed, consistent spelling such as Spanish. But linguists have applied thoughtful effort to improving reading instruction in English, and it is possible with the best materials, for example Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart,

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...

to make great progress in reading English independently in less than one year of instruction. (It's regrettable that more schools don't use superior books like Let's Read for initial reading instruction.) Part of the difficulty that pupils have in school in English-speaking countries comes from suboptimal reading instruction rather than from inherent features of the current English writing system.

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-Brad...

b) The study didn't test "European languages" exhaustively. It may be that there are some languages in Europe that present similar difficulties. Certainly there are languages in other regions of the world (including languages in the Indo-European language family) that present tougher challenges to primary-age learners learning to read, although those learners often overcome those challenges.

c) For overall adult performance in reading, exposure matters, and for second-language learners of English, the network effects of having huge numbers of users of English (both first-language users and second-language users) all over the world ensures that most second-language learners still reach quite an adequate level of reading proficiency in English, which indeed in many cases exploits the similarity of English spelling to spellings from foreign languages. English gains its position as the world interlanguage honestly and will not be challenged as the world interlanguage by any other language in the lifetime of anyone reading this message.

I can't find the full paper online, but it does seem to be a very narrowly defined idea of language aquisition. It deals only with children learning to read their native tongue. No allowance is made for any learning outside of the classroom. No consideration of the difficulty in learning the gender assignment to words in non-English languages. There are some valid observations too, but it's a pretty serious leap to draw the conclusion in the title.

'learn to READ' I want to point out, to help head off lots of needless argument.