This really seems like excusing the underperforming education system in US and cultural glorification of language bastardization. Every language has some areas that are difficult to grasp and English is one of the easier languages, as most people who have learned more than two foreign languages (including English, of course) can tell.
I too am not sure I buy the argument. While Danish has a institution 'controlling' the language, Danish is far more irregular than English is. This is also hindered by Danish having 18 basic vowels (most of any European language), although it has 9 (+4 from English) letters to describe the vowels. But even so, they overlap.
Despite Danish's inconsistencies, problems and - some might say - generally awfulness (which I personally like!), Denmark has a 99% literacy rate.[0]
Well, the article claims 20% of native English speakers cannot read or write properly.
> 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.
Everyone seems to agree that schools are garbage. Why doesn't someone do something about it?
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.)
School is 'garbage' because it's compulsory and is one of the few areas in a young person's life where they are forced to be disciplined when they're lazy, be organized when they're not, be thoughtful when they're pleased with simple, and/or work hard when they're tired.
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.
While I don't like school for those reasons, I also don't like how I don't get any options to actually learn stuff. Especially stuff that I care about. (I do learn some things, but not much.)
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.
The real relevance of content in school is often terrible, but until we can truly figure out what we care to educate our children about (which is exceedingly difficult without being able to agree on what skills will be needed in the future economy) compulsory education will remain hindered in this way.
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).
> Everyone seems to agree that schools are garbage. Why doesn't someone do something about it?
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.
No, I'm talking about high school. Though I think with how simple the basics are, I think they should be in middle school at the latest, I have never seen a high school programming class.
Two of our math teachers used to program a long time ago, the computer tech guy doesn't even do html I think he said.
Oh, well my school had 1 class and I've talked to co-workers that had similar classes at their schools but I agree that the vast majority of schools don't have anything like this.
My school had a programming class and a web design class.
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.
Our political parties have very different ideas about how to fix education. Liberals just keep lowering expectations (learning to read is too much now?) and conservatives just want to either fully privatize it or at least let "the market" fix it.
English is a foreign language for me and I think you're absolutely right. Every language has tough parts, but English is by far the easiest I've seen. Excusing the lack of proper education like that is just silly.
This is counter to all the anecdotes I've heard all my life (from everyday people to English majors) about the difficulty of English. I grew up and hang around American monolinguals.
By the way, it's not like other languages magically happened to avoid the same problems - from what I see looking at 19th century European text, they had the same issues that English still has.
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.
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.
Other languages don't just have spelling reforms, but they also have institutions which periodically update the spelling of words.
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".
You don't want to learn Kanji, there's about 2000 of them for words and they have several different readings depending on context. At least you can guess the reading of some English words when you read them.
I like how there are two ways to say "I have a headache" in Japanese, and they are written with the exact same Chinese characters, but are pronounced completely differently:
"我有頭痛" sounds very Taiwanese. This usage of 有 is an artifact of Taiwanese / Minnan dialect. The Standard Mandarin （普通话） way to phrase that sentence is just "我头疼" or "我头很疼". Also like you said, 疼 sounds a little more mainland and 痛 sounds a little more Taiwanese. A general word for "pain" is 疼痛, they are really synonymous.
You can also guess Kanji readings just by looking at them. The largest class of Chinese characters consists of the "phonosemantic compounds", which consist of a phonetic part (how to say it) and a semantic part (what it means). Over 90% of Chinese characters fall in this class, but I'm not sure what rate you'd encounter them in Japanese. You can start doing this fairly well once you know... I'm not sure... probably in the vicinity of several hundred characters.
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.
My Consultant said when I was diagnosed with dyslexia that in countrys like Italy where the langauges are very regular there is less diagnosed dyslexia as the language makes some tasks esier.
I don't really think that native English speakers have a problem in knowing how a certain sequence of characters should be pronounced. This kind of problem is usually typical of people (of any native language) with high levels of literacy - it happens when a substantial part of their vocabulary comes from reading books rather than oral communication (be it person to person or tv/ cinema).
To me, the problem of native English speakers seems to be that they are often unable to write their native language well enough not to come across as uneducated people.
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.
Because of the different accents, vowel sounds are pronounced differently in different native English countries and regions of countries, so associating one letter to a sound is only possible if you chose a particular accent, e.g. U.S. Great Lakes, U.S. Kentucky, or U.K. Manchester.
English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. [...] That’s bad news for English-speaking societies, which represent about 6 percent of the world’s population
That's also bad news for learners of English as a second language, who represent another perhaps 60% of the world.
I've been learning English since I was six, then went to a British university, completed my degree and now I live and work in the UK. My proficiency level would be easily rated at C1/C2 level - I am completely fluent in both reading and writing.
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.
I'm a native English speaker (Australian) and I find myself looking at a dictionary on average 5 times a day. Probably because of this, and an amateur passion for linguistics, I have a broader depth of knowledge on word definitions and pronunciations than most people I communicate with.
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.
> 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.
...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.
I'm a native English speaker who started watching movies and TV shows with the English subtitles turned on about 5 years ago, and in that time have found dozens of word pairs I thought were different, having only heard/spoken one word and read/written the other, but they were actually the same word. Just an idea.
I'm an English native and find there are few people I meet with as extensive a vocabulary as I have (but I don't move in academic circles or anything). However I find that there are words I know and use but pronounce differently to the norm, that's because they're words I've learnt through reading and never actually heard spoken by others.
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.
I have heard (from a Linguistics student) that it takes an adult native speaker of French / German / Spanish / Italian (European languages etc etc) about 4000 hours to reach basic competency in English, and the same going the other way.
Going from/to the European languages to/from Japanese or Chinese (etc etc) take about 8000 hours to reach basic competency.
That's because Indo-European languages are very similar to each other. You wouldn't be able to learn Finnish as quickly as you could learn Norwegian. The grammar is just too different for an English speaker.
Chinese grammar is pretty similar to English ex. tenses (which are much easier for an English speaker going to Chinese than a Chinese speaker going to English).
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.
To expand on the similarity between Chinese and English: both Chinese and English are "analytic languages", which rely on word order more than inflection. English is not as analytic as Chinese, but more analytic than other European languages (je vais, tu vas, il va, nous allons, vous allez, ils vont).
>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.
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?
I'd be interested to hear what the definition of "everyday literacy needs" is, because I've had a similar experience in the US. Unless there is a large concentration of people who are actually mostly illiterate in rural areas, this statistic must be misleading.
Perhaps it's the circles you move in - I've come across UK native adults who struggle to read basic texts. I'd peg it at more like 1 in 50 : but that might be an over-statement depending on what you consider "everyday literacy needs".
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..
I don't know many people, but I do know (not personally, he's in my school) who can't read. When we are reading out loud it takes him somewhere around a second per word.
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.
I think it is worth it to try this but it will likely go the way of Esperanto. English really is NOT especially challenging compared to other languages. And as anyone who travels in Europe will realize, there seems to be little problem with people learning it as a second language.
I'd say that's not so much because of whether it's easy or hard to learn or not, but because the vast majority of media (mostly movies and TV, but nowadays also the internet) is in English, often subtitled. Some countries dub it (like Germany), so the level of English there is often lower.
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.
I really don't understand why educators persist in trying to teach English reading and writing phonetically. It's not a phonetic language, so surely it is harmful to pretend that it is and lie to children about it.
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.
When my friend married a Hungarian woman, she brought her teenage sons to the US with her. I told them that I wanted to apologize in advance for two things: English spelling, and the Imperial measuring system. They were amused. While they all knew some English, the boys, not surprisingly, have learned more quickly than their mother.
What would the normative pronunciation be, and how long would it remain stable?
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.
In term of spelling French is much worse than English. I wonder how they compare in term of education level. My anecdotal experience living and going to school in both England and France as a kid leads me to believe that the level of British primary school is not very high and that basic knowledge in math and reading is introduced slower there.
> In term of spelling French is much worse than English.
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.
Well, I'm French and have a much easier time with spelling in English than in French... Joke aside, I guess having multiple sequence of characters map to the same sound have more of an effect on making spelling difficult.
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.
> Moët, as in the champagne, is pronounced moe-ETTE not moe-AY
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).
I don't find the spelling difficult at all. More regular than English, certainly. It's the damn gendered nouns! And they're not easy to guess, as in, say, Spanish. It's a huge impediment to picking up vocabulary. Downright demoralizing.
Is that really the case? There seem to be an awful lot where it's not: Bardot, Paris, Nantes, Flaubert, Monet, Camus, Dumas, Rimbaud, Truffaut, Roux, Lacroix, Godard, Foucault, Bordeaux, Versailles, Calais, Maginot....
That I can believe. English proper nouns are likewise typically more badly behaved, especially British English ones: Worcester (WUSS-ter), Featherstonehaugh (FAN-shaw), Dalziel, (d'-YELL), Menzies (MING-iz).
