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As a parent I too have experienced the frustration with English.

I want to teach my daughter some foundational principles from which to build a predictive model, but with English the insanity seems to begin immediately.

Some letters have multiple sounds, like C and G. Some sounds have multiple representations, like DG/J and KS/X. Some letters don't have their sound in their name, like W and Y. Reading phonetically is a technique that only works until it doesn't; silent characters, partially anglicized loan words, etc.

So while I'm trying to teach all this, I'm also doing my own discovery of what a qwerty-cubed language I'm dealing with. I never realized how broken the written language is until I tried to show it to someone.



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