How Spelling Keeps Kids From Learning
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.)
> 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.
That's the only reason I brought it up.
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.)
If I had to guess it's because until/unless you have kids it "doesn't affect you" (I put that in quotes because it does but the consequences are not right in your face, see global warming).
> 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.)
I had a programming class (Java and a little c++) in HS but I realize you are probably asking about elementary/middle schools primarily.
But generally, probably the same reason schools don't have engineering classes, accounting classes, actuarial classes, financial classes, legal, nursing, etc. etc. They are considered career specialties that you learn post high school.
Neither makes any sense to me.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize the specific ways in which we educate our children - but the general unease with the 'education system' has more to do with everyone having been through it (making them experts on teaching, apparently) and having negative memories of a time where they were particularly socially and mentally stressed.
I personally like math, but we have spent more than a week on basic sin/cos/tan/csc/sec/cot curves doing things I already know.
Also, I don't like stress. Some amount of stress is bad, but I don't care about my grades anymore because that was too much stress. (I'm good at school, so I can get good grades just by doing my homework, the increase isn't worth the stress.)
I've also noticed the few adults (mostly my mom/relatives) I've talked to in real life about school (I've talked to other people in running start (college classes in high school) or at game jams, but not about how I don't like school.) seem to be of the opinion that I "need to learn stuff and things."
If I learn less after school I will be very disappointed, because I'm pretty much terrible at everything I do and I need to get decent at something.
At least for me, I would like to see a de-emphasis of content and A stronger focus on preparing young people to educate themselves, to be curious about our world. If you bring this to the table on your own I would hardly worry about 'learning less after school'. After all, only you have done your learning this far in life. School is only one structure for learning (that is often expected to be/treated as if it's the only one).
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.
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.
It's pronunciation that's hard to guess from kanji.
頭が痛い (atama ga itai)
頭痛がする (zutsuu ga suru)
harakiri (腹切) is seppuku (切腹) backwards
Several different readings is a bit of an exaggeration, it's more common to just have a kun'yomi and on'yomi reading, and on average I think the number of readings you'd know for a character is between one and two.
Purely from personal experience, I hear adult native English speakers (including myself) mispronounce words all the time! It's a common mistake to pronounce a word as if it were borrowed from e.g. French when it was really borrowed from Greek or Latin. So if you want to know how to pronounce "ch", you might say /ʃ/ if it's French and /tʃ/ if it's English. This seems to me like another variation on the same problem we have with reading Japanese, where characters have Japanese and Chinese readings.
昨日 is sakujitsu or something? nope, it's kinou 明日 is just as bad
行く can be both iku and yuku, good luck telling them apart
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.
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.
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.
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.
It's certainly not uncommon for native English speakers to have no idea how to pronounce a whole bunch of English words because they don't use them, so you're not alone there.
I always tell people: read with a dictionary and understand the pronunciation key! Or use an app or web dictionary that has a 'play' button.
Having said all of that, I don't know if it's a huge problem - most people get by fine with the words they know, and domain-specific words tend to be ones you learn in the field.
Also, as a sidenote: I won't be learning pronunciation that way because I would rather enjoy reading things than learn to pronounce them properly.
...and even that isn't much of a problem if other people supply the correct pronunciation in a fun happy helpful way, instead of the sneering or sarcastic manner often used.
Can't think of any just now - insouciance is a word I've never heard anyone else speak, but I think I pronounce that one correctly. Hopefully I've conveyed well enough what I mean without example. Actually Linux is an example - used it for years before I met another user and then heard Linus tell me how I'd pronounced it wrong, slightly different as it's a [foreign] name, I digress.
Going from/to the European languages to/from Japanese or Chinese (etc etc) take about 8000 hours to reach basic competency.
Tones are no big deal unless you think about them. Ever thought about your breathing? Tones are a bit like that. Just don't think about them, let the sentence flow.
Characters are the killer. Not hard, but slow and tedious. 2 per day... 5 per day... 10 per day... cram and 100 per day... but they're lost without constant reinforcement.
Then the thorn you were trying to ignore comes back, and idiomatic sentences (chengyu, based on 4 characters, 'long time no see' being of the form, or 'people mountain people sea' a super simple one) based on cultural or historical references come back, kick you to the curb again. Much as English idioms do.
And then speaking formally... different ball game. Pomp and circumstance rule.
But informal spoken Chinese is surprisingly easy to attain. Just get the accent down.
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?
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..
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.
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:
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.
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.
How's that compare to Chinese? Are Chinese kids at a disadvantage learning to read?
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.
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.]
I think this is a rule of the trema - the vowel is not diphtongued and the following consonant is not silent. Words like Noël, Anaïs are pronounced the same way (no-ELLE and ana-YSSE).
While I think that indeed a given sequence of characters is generally pronounced the same what is confusing for children is the plethora of consonants that are not pronounced. So ils chantent and il ment. écoles et les and so on... There's also the liaisons that adds a lot of confusion between what's written and what's actually pronounced. But maybe you're right and this is more of a problem in English.