This is a load of hooey. I taught three kids to read, and it was no problem at all. At about the age of three to four I taught the alphabet, one letter at a time (there are only 26 of them) and their sound equivalents. I found that there’s something about the mind at that age which keeps them from realizing the connection between sounding the individual letters of a word, and the whole word itself. However, between the ages of five and six, something “clicks” and virtually overnight they begin reading, fluently and without stumbling, almost as if by magic. From that day forth they can begin applying their new-found skill to their further education, and entertainment, if it comes to that.
If English spelling is such an impediment to reading, why is it that past generations learned to read without experiencing any of the problems today’s generation is going through?
I was going to read the article but I had already read it.
;-)
Isn’t this article nothing more than another front in the war against western civilization?
Yeah. English is a dying language. Hardly anyone in the world uses it any more...
Somewhere in this post we must link to Weird Al’s Word Crimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
That should do it!
Good grief. Not this SHIT again. My youngest, 21 year old twins, suffered through what our school district called “creative spelling”. Spelling was deemed not as important as the thoughts the children were trying to express. It took years for them to recover from this nonsense.
Simple languages are for simple thoughts.
What a bunch of naval gazing.... ;)
For the last seven years youngsters with surnames from the Indian subcontinent have won the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bees. Why? Because they work at it.
French, Italian and Spanish have genders for nouns that people have to learn so that the equivalent of “the” is correctly matched by gender.
German has case endings for nouns and adjectives as well as gender that all have to be learned.
Luckily English no longer has either.
Funny how tyrants are all alike.
This simplification lunacy was all the rage at the beginning of the last century. George Bernard Shaw was one of its proponents, IIRC
Why didn’t this jackwad just write her article phonetically? Other than wanting to keep her job, of course.
Luba Vangelova ?
Not going to touch that.
:o/
Cuz spelin b racis.
I get so angry with articles like this.
Has the english language changed in the last fifty years?
Why are these folks always making excuses. If the kids worked on their grammar and spelling, life would be a lot easier for them.
Funny how that works.
It would be a lot easier just to change the pronunciation to match the spelling.
I was once watching a weather report on Scottish TV, and over there ‘night’ is indeed pronounced ‘night’!
When the three “Rs” were being taught, I remember very few kids dropping out of school or not being able to read and write. But then, those kids mostly had two parents in real marriages that cared about their kids and wanted them to succeed in life.
Around here, all grades of ignorance are excused by “I’m just a dumb old country boy/girl”. We sometimes call it Appalachian Ebonics.
Once I saw how letters, sounds and words worked it was like Hellen Keller in The Miracle Worker. It was like a code had been cracked and I could understand everything. Sure we have issues with spellings and pronunciations that "break the rules", but we learn the exceptions and move on.
This is to accommodate all the new Americans.