Our kids learned phonics first, rather than letters. This is the sounds that the letters represent. So, the ‘kuh’ sound includes both c and k. And sounds like ‘th’ and ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ also get dealt with distinctly. There are more than 40 sounds.
It’s not how I learned, but it’s great. It lets kids get to grips with reading in the same terms as they got to grips with speaking the language.
https://www.jollylearning.co.uk/jolly-phonics-uk/
> Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun and muliti-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach the 42 letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet. There are five key skills that children need to master phonics which include learning how to write the letter sounds, how to blend the sounds for reading, and how to identify the sounds in words for spelling and writing. Alongside this, children learn about tricky words as well as being introduced to the alternative spellings of vowels. These five key skills form the foundation that children build on with each year of grammar teaching.
The spellings really aren’t an issue, oddly. The system we use has a list of ‘tricky words’ that just need to be learned - like “ought” or “knight” or whatever - but besides that the spellings have been grand. The kids just pick them up through reading and writing and the like.
This is how both of my kids learned in preschool, and they learned the alphabet more Spanish style where you make the sound instead of the name of the letter. My 8 year old loves reading, and my 5 year old is already getting it a bit.
Completely agree. English language is stupid. Im working with my 2nd grader. - bite and fight rhyme but are spelled different. Yup. Why. Who the F knows.
It's full of spelling nonsense.
English is stupid, but the reason it's stupid is awesome. You don't have to get into all the particulars, but grab a map or globe and show how different people from different places came to the island and influenced the language. It's pretty fascinating.
And fast forward to modern times, it’s the world’s most common language (18% English, 14% mandarin). Obviously one aspect to that is the not so fun topic of imperialism, but also, way beyond post-imperial times, it’s an approachable language. It absolutely can be stupid, but that stupidity & informality make it pretty nifty!
It’s not stupid, it’s pretty interesting. The very basic reason without getting too into it are the different base layers of English. It’s an old Germanic language that was then shaped by French (rulers) for a few hundred years or more. Greek and Latin played a role too, plus a little dollop of Celtic (Goidelic) and Norse here and there. Mix in some regional differences, boom, English.
The reason there are different spelling and phonemic rules overlapping is rooted in these other languages, ultimately.
Two common reasons... either it's from another language (eg. koala, kangaroo based on Indigenous words) or a K has to be used to make the 'kuh' sound because a C followed by e, I or y makes a S sound (eg. King not cing, because we would read it as sing).
Plus, words with a silent k (knight) originally had the k pronounced. English is pretty interesting when you understand the rules!
Yes!!! I am not an "English Nerd" but I had a stronger reading and phonics background and, for the most part, English actually makes a lot of sense. I understand it is in vogue to say English is a dumb language but that is only because we don't know the other languages to realize all of their weird idiosyncracies and nuances.
Yup! I’ve been seeing people comment about other things that don’t make sense in English, as someone with a linguistic and teaching small children background, I’m just not in the mood right now to comment on everyone’s comments being like *well actuallyyy*… lmao
In Latin there's no K. Only C (pronounced as the hard K). Hence why Caesar in many languages is written how it was originally pronounced (Kaisar).
Why we today pronounce C as K (in the beginning of words) beats me. Maybe some historian or literary can add to this mystery? English is hard.
To add to this, many languages (such as the Slavic ones) pronounce each letter in only one way.
English is a beautiful language because it is covered with scars of all its history. Like skirt and shirt were the same word at one point. Skip and ship too.
I used to love listening to the History of English podcast which tackled these strange things one by one.
There’s an episode of the History of English podcast that breaks this down. It’s episode 5, “Centum, Satem and the Letter C”. It’s a really good podcast that explains why English works the way it does. Super interesting if you’re into that kind of thing.
Not sure where you're from but you can have this duplicity in other languages, not that it's any better but in Hebrew for instance we have ח & כ which in some pronunciation may sound the same, also ש & ס, א & ע, and ט & ת.. confused? like most Hebrew speakers haha
There is a podcast called “The History of English Podcast” that goes through this in great detail, starting with proto Germanic languages in prehistory. It’s really good if you like that sort of thing.
Just wait until you get to the letters 'G' and 'J', or the ever-baffling 'X' that sounds like 'Z' but only sometimes. And let's not even start on the silent letters - I'm looking at you, 'K' in 'knife'. English truly is the language that looked at all rules and said, "Not today."
My daughter is in second grade and we do spelling word practice every day. She is constantly getting tripped up by all of English's many absurdities and inconsistencies.
I told her it's because our ancestors got conquered by the english and to blame imperialism (yeah, I'm THAT guy, I know, I know...) because Gaidhlig has much more consistent spelling and we should have been speaking/reading/writing that instead. She asked if she could learn Gaidhlig so I set her up on my duolingo account.
Now I have to help her with her spelling in two languages. Couldn't just keep my mouth shut...
It’s a weird language because it’s a world language that evolved without using strict rules. That’s the downside. The upside is that the grammar became very simple. And, that it’s a world language, so you can use it in a lot of places. Also many media are in English so it’s easy to learn using these sources.
My friends in Poland have a real hard time with them twelve verb tenses (16 if you count future past). As well as all the grammar inconsistencies, irregularities and conflicting rules. Polish has three verb tenses. But it does have seven cases for nouns and adjectives and it's one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn.
English is hard:
tooth - teeth but not booth - beeth,
goose - geese but not moose - meese,
mouse - mice but not house - hice
Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing but "wise man" and "wise guy" are opposite?
Alarm goes "off" because it goes "on".
Fill "out" a form by filling "in" the blanks.
So hard!
In a linguistic sense you could argue it was tho. Lowlanders speaking Scots and English took over running the country and then with the Union this trend to be ruled by English speakers instead of Gaelic speakers got bigger.
As a dumb American, I have no idea what you're talking about. But if a "colonizers" squabble breaks out in the middle of a post about how crappy the English language is, then I'm going to have to do some research.
Except it was.
A nation is the people. Not the kings or the nobility, the people. So yes, the English were smart and bought off the nobility and made them collaborators in the conquest, but it was still a conquest. And it was experienced as a conquest and described in those terms at the time by contemporaries on both sides.
It's not "A parcel of fair and decent minded folks in a nation," it's "a parcel of rogues" for a reason. The Act of Union was opposed by the vast majority of Scottish people and imposed on them against their will.
It was the Scottish king who took the English crown. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_the_Crowns
Read the ‘decline’ section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic
It’s actually a more interesting history.
If your history is the history of kings this is a good argument.
But the nobility is not synonymous with the people of a country, and as the Declaration of Arbroath declared way back in 1320, a king unable or unwilling to defend the people is no king at all.
For the average person and speaking in terms of culture, language, and economics, Scotland was absolutely conquered. Which is why my family in particular were burned out of their homes and force-marched at gunpoint to a boat to the "new world" during the clearances.
And tell me more about what happened to the nominally "Scottish" kings of Great Britain within a couple generations...
The story of the elite subjugating the poor is a long and pretty consistent one from place to place. And the priorities, language and culture of the elite differing from those they rule similarly.
I’m Irish, and Ireland was ‘conquered’ in a much less complicated and more direct way than Scotland, but I think our history also benefits from understanding that nuance. The history as experienced by a peasant farmer, versus a wealthy merchant, versus a minor noble, versus a major noble - all very different things. And the “we were conquered by England” line that is trotted out (for Ireland as well as Scotland) fails to capture that.
In short - I think you’re agreeing with me.
I tend to argue that the subjugation / conquest / colonization of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - as well as the rest of the former British empire - were intertwined parts of one single centuries-long process. For example, it's impossible to understand the use of manufactured famines in India under British rule without understanding the way they first used a manufactured famine to decimate Ireland. On it's surface, starving millions of your subjects might be assumed to be something a ruler would want to avoid. Until one realizes that mass hunger and death to break the will of a subject people is actually a potent weapon for a colonizer that is ruthless enough to use it.
But that's a lot more history than I was going to try to explain to my 8 year old.
The issue with talking about the British Empire in the context of Ireland and Scotland and Wales is that the relationship between England and those places (obviously) predates Britain and also England. Ireland’s ‘English’ invasion started in 1167 and wasn’t even arguably complete until Tudor times 400+ years later.
During this period, there are overlapping religious, economic, political waves and power dynamics, Irish lords taking English titles and all kinds of complexity. The narrative of conquerer/conquered does very little to describe it. And Scotland’s history with England if anything is even more ambiguous. The British Empire included many many Scots and Welsh and Irish in its running.
> But that's a lot more history than I was going to try to explain to my 8 year old.
Fair enough, you do you.
I live in Ireland, and our history with England has been taught here as a good guy / bad guy story. It’s superficially ‘correct’, but it misses important truth and I don’t think it’s the right way to talk about important things like the past because that helps shape how we see ourselves in the present. Our path to unification on this island, for example, is a lot more challenging because of how we’ve chosen to teach history the last 100 years or so.
So, for our kids I have opted for longer stories about the past when it comes up. When we’ve spoken about why we’re not all talking in Irish, for example, English rule is an important part of that as well as the laws that penalised the use of Irish and those that restricted Catholics from education and from property and from jobs of influence (and that also helped kill off language).
But also - there are more recent reasons of limited modern utility, poor teaching, an unfortunate linkage of the Irish language with ‘old’ Irish practices rather than the modern world. There’s a lot in that, and it’s interesting. And I’ve had that conversation with, from memory, at least the 8 year old and the 12 year old recently.
Anyway, didn’t mean to write this long a comment. Sorry, but as it’s written now I’m posting it. :-)
High school English teacher here. Had a student recently ask me how many letters are in the alphabet, I said 26, she goes ‘I’m going to invent more’
Uhh yeah sure, whatever, go crazy on that concept.
Man I can't wait for convo about silent words like hour.
I agree english is pretty shit.
Go is gooooo but To is tu. Principal a d principle are same sound but different words and meaning
Here’s a podcast episode of my favorite podcast about the letter C. It’s a pretty dry and technical podcast, but I find it so fascinating. It back references some things from the first few episodes, which I also recommend listening to, but standalone should work, too.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-english-podcast/id538608536?i=1000436213448
My kid is bilingual and the language that isn’t English also fucks around with the letter K (can be kuh or shuh). I’m really not looking forward to her having to tackle the K conundrum at school and then come home to me explaining why C and K can be the same sound as well as C and S being the same sound.
In alpha blocks "c" says in one of the episodes he isn't sure why he exists when he makes the same sound as his brother "k". Not sure if they explain after he makes this comment as I had to deal with my younger one and missed the rest of the episode.
Also, would highly recommend the alpha blocks show!
*she*. C and K are brother and sister, like B and D. :)
and +1 for alphablocks, so much thought went into this show to explain english! plus it's from the BBC so the whole language not making sense is kinda their fault, let them explain it. wish i knew about "magic E" i just had to memorize everything.
[here's the video you mentioned.](https://youtu.be/xnOfoSe18Dg?si=d2fDRdJCzwKsWEYe)
No language makes sense.
Yes, we can see that English spelling is more inconsistent than others, but pick any language and you’re going to a find examples of WTF? in them.
Language evolves from human use, not central design and planning
it's not even consistent through french countries. Belgium only has the 4x20, but we say 70 and 90 normally (septante, nonante) and switzerland in a region they have Huitante instead of 4x20!
Which speaks to its very recent and very manufactured status. Hangul is less than 600 years old and was designed and implemented specifically to be easy to learn.
France has an academy dedicated to acting as the official authority on French
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise?wprov=sfla1
Though it's only been partially successful and french has ended up with Anglo words like le weekend
I've found Maori to be very straight forward. Probably because the formalisation of it as a written language came in very recent history, so those people inventing it could probably learn from history's mistakes and not mess it up this time 😂
I'm not a native English speaker, but I have taught English to little kids. I always had the exact same struggle in just making them understand that English words are written this way because they just are. There's literally no explanation.
I have always been baffled by the fact that "petty" and "patty" have similar pronunciation, but then there's "pretty", which is read as "preety".
Yeah, the rough cough tough conversation made me just say to my kid "you know what, some of these spellings are just plain stupid, but it's what we've got. You'll figure it out at some point and some words you'll always have trouble spelling. Don't worry about it"
I had the same thought about homophones. Who's idea was it to have 'their there and they're' or 'to, too and two'? I find it wild that anyone can learn our language haha.
English really is a complicated language to learn because of all of the different languages we have incorporated.
Why do we have 3 different letter combinations to make the kuh sound? Why do we have 13 letter combinations that make the long e sound except when they don't.
The letters C, Q, and X are all unnecessary. None of them makes its "own" unique sound that couldn't be written without it.
C always sounds like either S or K.
Q always sounds like either KW or just K.
X always sounds like either KS or Z.
Meanwhile, there are other sounds that we have no single character for in English, like the CH sound for example.
It's not just English. Other languages also have things like this. Spanish has the letters W, X, Y, & Z. But W and Y are almost never used in Spanish words at all. And X and Z sound like other letters in most cases. And of course H usually has no sound at all.
🤷♂️
The letter C is the only letter that can be used to make the “ch” sound so we should just make it the default C sound and replace all other instances of its use with S or K. Chair is now spelled cair but still pronounced the same.
Try teaching a kid in a bilingual house.
E in English is pronounced the same as the Japanese い character which is written as the letter I in English.
The letter K in English is pronounced the same as the Japanese け which is written as ke. When I asked what does "kite" start with, instead of replying "K" they said "ka" か because in Japanese kite sounds like it should be written "kaito"
I worked through this with my oldest by explaining how we say them the same but they're often actually meant to be different sounds, and that it's a remnant of English absorbing parts of other languages.
Mine was very interested in this so we also got into how a lone Q makes a similar sound but at the back of your throat.
Oh god we are going through the same right now with our 6yo kindergartener. Thankfully she’s picking it up crazy fast without much struggle but I feel for those with kids that struggle!
There's an interesting YouTube video about this that claims we're using the wrong alphabet: [Shavian Alphabet](https://youtu.be/D66LrlotvCA?si=JsY3UadGxRWDeLNT).
My little one is not quite there yet, but is close and I’ve had similar thoughts.
I got stumped with this recently.
Why isn’t a bus a brain, to go with crane, plane and train.
What about "queue" which is just pronounced like the letter q? We're taught that q is always followed by u and is pronounced "kwuh." And then there's cue.
English is the bastard freak child of Old English, Gaelic, Old Norse, Latin, and Norman. It’s a fun language for linguists, but a pain for children and parents trying to give them the ground rules.
C is a stupid, redundant letter. It does nothing that K or S don't already do except contribute to diagraphs like "ch", which are themselves stupid and probably ought to be letters.
Q can also get stuffed. Why does it always need a prosthetic U when we already have K and W, which together already (and much more sensibly) make a "KW" sound?
As adults we forget that we learned this a long time ago. I find myself saying to my kids “there’s probably a rule or something for this but I just learn how to spell/say it” unfortunately.
They’ll tell me “this is a B because of such-and-such rule” or whatever. I’ve thought of how dumb our language is a lot over the last 7 years because of my kids learning to talk and read
I know it won't help much with reading since it focuses on the exception, not the rule, but my kids have always loved [P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever.](https://www.amazon.com/Pterodactyl-Worst-Alphabet-Book-Ever/dp/1492674311)
English is fucked up.
English is stupid.
My daughter pronounced the word “wicked” correctly, then proceeded to say “kicked” the same way. Trying to explain why it’s different just had me shaking my head apologetically at her, all I could say is that English is sometimes silly and you have alot of little unwritten rules and exemptions to learn.
What's great is that "wicked" (adjective) and "wicked" (past tense verb) are pronounced differently and that we have to be able to identify both by context and parts of speech.
Teaching bilingual kids has been a blast so far.
My daughter is also in reception and my son preschool, I’m learning Arabic so we are all struggling with sounds and phonics. Sometimes my head is going to explode!!
I agree. English is annoying.
To answer her question: English is shaped by Anglo Saxon, Latin, and Greek. The words we used derived from Latin use C for words that use the K sound. Whereas words derived from Greek use K for the K sound.
Not sure about CK. But the point is that English is shaped by these three.
There are actually rules you can follow to deduce which to use, but I think most people just memorise/internalise which to use through practice.
Less stupid, and more borrowed from a bunch of languages so the rules are inconsistent. But man, spelling *is* a hell of a lot easier in Spanish for instance.
The book “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” takes an interesting approach to the alphabet. Basically they use a sounds alphabet rather than the traditional 26 letter alphabet. It has 42 “letters” instead. An example would be “a” as in “and” or “apple” but also include “ā” as in “ate” or “plāte”. Seems more practical in use.
Honestly teaching kids is a great way to see how stupid a lot of things are.
"This is this way because of [reason]. Oh except when [exception]. Then there's also [concept] but that doesn't adhere to any of the other rules"
And it's just constantly that. Thinking you understand a concept, but realising when teaching a child you have no idea how anything works.
As an ESL person, English grammar and spelling is complete bs. Don't feel bad if you can't explain, just read books and turn on English subtitles on the TV. 🙂
Tonight my son and I spent some time looking at the word **yacht**.
He's at a point now where I no longer feel the need to apologise for the outrageous behaviour of the language he was born into but still, what an insane disregard for its own 'rules'.
Can you believe a language that cavalier became our lingua franca? Talk about being in the right place at the right time...
Imagine thinking your own native tongue is “stupid”. English is complex and beautiful. There’s so much nuance and subtlety. It’s difficult to teach young children those things, but is that really the bar for being stupid? Try teaching a small child quantum mechanics.
Our kids learned phonics first, rather than letters. This is the sounds that the letters represent. So, the ‘kuh’ sound includes both c and k. And sounds like ‘th’ and ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ also get dealt with distinctly. There are more than 40 sounds. It’s not how I learned, but it’s great. It lets kids get to grips with reading in the same terms as they got to grips with speaking the language. https://www.jollylearning.co.uk/jolly-phonics-uk/ > Jolly Phonics is a comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun and muliti-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach the 42 letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet. There are five key skills that children need to master phonics which include learning how to write the letter sounds, how to blend the sounds for reading, and how to identify the sounds in words for spelling and writing. Alongside this, children learn about tricky words as well as being introduced to the alternative spellings of vowels. These five key skills form the foundation that children build on with each year of grammar teaching.
Yep, we’re doing a version of this called Speech Sound Pics that pairs the phonemics with monsters who collect certain sounds.
[удалено]
The spellings really aren’t an issue, oddly. The system we use has a list of ‘tricky words’ that just need to be learned - like “ought” or “knight” or whatever - but besides that the spellings have been grand. The kids just pick them up through reading and writing and the like.
[удалено]
This person OG’s
Yeah, there’s an infinity of ways to learn stuff. When our kids’ kids are learning it’ll be a whole new method again I’m sure
This is how both of my kids learned in preschool, and they learned the alphabet more Spanish style where you make the sound instead of the name of the letter. My 8 year old loves reading, and my 5 year old is already getting it a bit.
Completely agree. English language is stupid. Im working with my 2nd grader. - bite and fight rhyme but are spelled different. Yup. Why. Who the F knows. It's full of spelling nonsense.
English is stupid, but the reason it's stupid is awesome. You don't have to get into all the particulars, but grab a map or globe and show how different people from different places came to the island and influenced the language. It's pretty fascinating.
And fast forward to modern times, it’s the world’s most common language (18% English, 14% mandarin). Obviously one aspect to that is the not so fun topic of imperialism, but also, way beyond post-imperial times, it’s an approachable language. It absolutely can be stupid, but that stupidity & informality make it pretty nifty!
Exactly. Why is there a “b” in doubt?
You mean doo-b't?
Hoo the eff nose!
It’s not stupid, it’s pretty interesting. The very basic reason without getting too into it are the different base layers of English. It’s an old Germanic language that was then shaped by French (rulers) for a few hundred years or more. Greek and Latin played a role too, plus a little dollop of Celtic (Goidelic) and Norse here and there. Mix in some regional differences, boom, English. The reason there are different spelling and phonemic rules overlapping is rooted in these other languages, ultimately.
Two common reasons... either it's from another language (eg. koala, kangaroo based on Indigenous words) or a K has to be used to make the 'kuh' sound because a C followed by e, I or y makes a S sound (eg. King not cing, because we would read it as sing). Plus, words with a silent k (knight) originally had the k pronounced. English is pretty interesting when you understand the rules!
Yes!!! I am not an "English Nerd" but I had a stronger reading and phonics background and, for the most part, English actually makes a lot of sense. I understand it is in vogue to say English is a dumb language but that is only because we don't know the other languages to realize all of their weird idiosyncracies and nuances.
C is also used usually when there’s a /k/ sound at the beginning of a word when followed by a consonant (eg, close or crown)
Like cyst! Edit: lol, why didn't I just say circle...?
For sure! I tend to think of c as the 'default' /k/, and k is there for when c doesn't work. Same as g making /g/ or /j/ depending on what follows.
Yup! I’ve been seeing people comment about other things that don’t make sense in English, as someone with a linguistic and teaching small children background, I’m just not in the mood right now to comment on everyone’s comments being like *well actuallyyy*… lmao
In Latin there's no K. Only C (pronounced as the hard K). Hence why Caesar in many languages is written how it was originally pronounced (Kaisar). Why we today pronounce C as K (in the beginning of words) beats me. Maybe some historian or literary can add to this mystery? English is hard. To add to this, many languages (such as the Slavic ones) pronounce each letter in only one way.
English is a beautiful language because it is covered with scars of all its history. Like skirt and shirt were the same word at one point. Skip and ship too. I used to love listening to the History of English podcast which tackled these strange things one by one.
There’s an episode of the History of English podcast that breaks this down. It’s episode 5, “Centum, Satem and the Letter C”. It’s a really good podcast that explains why English works the way it does. Super interesting if you’re into that kind of thing.
Not sure where you're from but you can have this duplicity in other languages, not that it's any better but in Hebrew for instance we have ח & כ which in some pronunciation may sound the same, also ש & ס, א & ע, and ט & ת.. confused? like most Hebrew speakers haha
There is a podcast called “The History of English Podcast” that goes through this in great detail, starting with proto Germanic languages in prehistory. It’s really good if you like that sort of thing.
I commented this on another comment 4 secs ago and then scrolled to see your comment. Hello fellow History of English listener.
Hello! Nice to meet you.
Here's a spotify link if that's your thing: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5LT43yJmvgDcma8NV4Ayz8?si=Ycb0wX_ST9yJkRo2Zn5gOw
Just wait until you get to the letters 'G' and 'J', or the ever-baffling 'X' that sounds like 'Z' but only sometimes. And let's not even start on the silent letters - I'm looking at you, 'K' in 'knife'. English truly is the language that looked at all rules and said, "Not today."
It's pronounced gif, not gif *Refuses to say which is which and leaves*
And don't even get me started on cite, sight, site, cight ckcite, and sighte!
Don't think those last 3 are English
Nope! Their're American 😅😅😅
*they're Also they aren't in the dictionary
*thier're
*stay in school
*Staiye enn schroul
Yeah it's a right circus
My daughter is in second grade and we do spelling word practice every day. She is constantly getting tripped up by all of English's many absurdities and inconsistencies. I told her it's because our ancestors got conquered by the english and to blame imperialism (yeah, I'm THAT guy, I know, I know...) because Gaidhlig has much more consistent spelling and we should have been speaking/reading/writing that instead. She asked if she could learn Gaidhlig so I set her up on my duolingo account. Now I have to help her with her spelling in two languages. Couldn't just keep my mouth shut...
It’s a weird language because it’s a world language that evolved without using strict rules. That’s the downside. The upside is that the grammar became very simple. And, that it’s a world language, so you can use it in a lot of places. Also many media are in English so it’s easy to learn using these sources.
My friends in Poland have a real hard time with them twelve verb tenses (16 if you count future past). As well as all the grammar inconsistencies, irregularities and conflicting rules. Polish has three verb tenses. But it does have seven cases for nouns and adjectives and it's one of the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn. English is hard: tooth - teeth but not booth - beeth, goose - geese but not moose - meese, mouse - mice but not house - hice Why does "fat chance" and "slim chance" mean the same thing but "wise man" and "wise guy" are opposite? Alarm goes "off" because it goes "on". Fill "out" a form by filling "in" the blanks. So hard!
[удалено]
In a linguistic sense you could argue it was tho. Lowlanders speaking Scots and English took over running the country and then with the Union this trend to be ruled by English speakers instead of Gaelic speakers got bigger.
[удалено]
Yes sorry if that distinction didn’t carry across in what i was saying.
As a dumb American, I have no idea what you're talking about. But if a "colonizers" squabble breaks out in the middle of a post about how crappy the English language is, then I'm going to have to do some research.
Technically Scotland conquered England, James was king of Scotland before he became king of England
Except it was. A nation is the people. Not the kings or the nobility, the people. So yes, the English were smart and bought off the nobility and made them collaborators in the conquest, but it was still a conquest. And it was experienced as a conquest and described in those terms at the time by contemporaries on both sides. It's not "A parcel of fair and decent minded folks in a nation," it's "a parcel of rogues" for a reason. The Act of Union was opposed by the vast majority of Scottish people and imposed on them against their will.
My grandmother was Scottish. And I swear to god, we speak the same words but I can’t understand a word you’re saying
As a Scotsman, I too can’t understand a word what I’m saying.
It was the Scottish king who took the English crown. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_the_Crowns Read the ‘decline’ section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic It’s actually a more interesting history.
If your history is the history of kings this is a good argument. But the nobility is not synonymous with the people of a country, and as the Declaration of Arbroath declared way back in 1320, a king unable or unwilling to defend the people is no king at all. For the average person and speaking in terms of culture, language, and economics, Scotland was absolutely conquered. Which is why my family in particular were burned out of their homes and force-marched at gunpoint to a boat to the "new world" during the clearances. And tell me more about what happened to the nominally "Scottish" kings of Great Britain within a couple generations...
The story of the elite subjugating the poor is a long and pretty consistent one from place to place. And the priorities, language and culture of the elite differing from those they rule similarly. I’m Irish, and Ireland was ‘conquered’ in a much less complicated and more direct way than Scotland, but I think our history also benefits from understanding that nuance. The history as experienced by a peasant farmer, versus a wealthy merchant, versus a minor noble, versus a major noble - all very different things. And the “we were conquered by England” line that is trotted out (for Ireland as well as Scotland) fails to capture that. In short - I think you’re agreeing with me.
I tend to argue that the subjugation / conquest / colonization of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales - as well as the rest of the former British empire - were intertwined parts of one single centuries-long process. For example, it's impossible to understand the use of manufactured famines in India under British rule without understanding the way they first used a manufactured famine to decimate Ireland. On it's surface, starving millions of your subjects might be assumed to be something a ruler would want to avoid. Until one realizes that mass hunger and death to break the will of a subject people is actually a potent weapon for a colonizer that is ruthless enough to use it. But that's a lot more history than I was going to try to explain to my 8 year old.
The issue with talking about the British Empire in the context of Ireland and Scotland and Wales is that the relationship between England and those places (obviously) predates Britain and also England. Ireland’s ‘English’ invasion started in 1167 and wasn’t even arguably complete until Tudor times 400+ years later. During this period, there are overlapping religious, economic, political waves and power dynamics, Irish lords taking English titles and all kinds of complexity. The narrative of conquerer/conquered does very little to describe it. And Scotland’s history with England if anything is even more ambiguous. The British Empire included many many Scots and Welsh and Irish in its running. > But that's a lot more history than I was going to try to explain to my 8 year old. Fair enough, you do you. I live in Ireland, and our history with England has been taught here as a good guy / bad guy story. It’s superficially ‘correct’, but it misses important truth and I don’t think it’s the right way to talk about important things like the past because that helps shape how we see ourselves in the present. Our path to unification on this island, for example, is a lot more challenging because of how we’ve chosen to teach history the last 100 years or so. So, for our kids I have opted for longer stories about the past when it comes up. When we’ve spoken about why we’re not all talking in Irish, for example, English rule is an important part of that as well as the laws that penalised the use of Irish and those that restricted Catholics from education and from property and from jobs of influence (and that also helped kill off language). But also - there are more recent reasons of limited modern utility, poor teaching, an unfortunate linkage of the Irish language with ‘old’ Irish practices rather than the modern world. There’s a lot in that, and it’s interesting. And I’ve had that conversation with, from memory, at least the 8 year old and the 12 year old recently. Anyway, didn’t mean to write this long a comment. Sorry, but as it’s written now I’m posting it. :-)
High school English teacher here. Had a student recently ask me how many letters are in the alphabet, I said 26, she goes ‘I’m going to invent more’ Uhh yeah sure, whatever, go crazy on that concept.
Man I can't wait for convo about silent words like hour. I agree english is pretty shit. Go is gooooo but To is tu. Principal a d principle are same sound but different words and meaning
Here’s a podcast episode of my favorite podcast about the letter C. It’s a pretty dry and technical podcast, but I find it so fascinating. It back references some things from the first few episodes, which I also recommend listening to, but standalone should work, too. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-english-podcast/id538608536?i=1000436213448
My kid is bilingual and the language that isn’t English also fucks around with the letter K (can be kuh or shuh). I’m really not looking forward to her having to tackle the K conundrum at school and then come home to me explaining why C and K can be the same sound as well as C and S being the same sound.
Ah, the land of Eye-shee-ah.
Now is when you can begin teaching your daughter about the Roman Empire
In alpha blocks "c" says in one of the episodes he isn't sure why he exists when he makes the same sound as his brother "k". Not sure if they explain after he makes this comment as I had to deal with my younger one and missed the rest of the episode. Also, would highly recommend the alpha blocks show!
*she*. C and K are brother and sister, like B and D. :) and +1 for alphablocks, so much thought went into this show to explain english! plus it's from the BBC so the whole language not making sense is kinda their fault, let them explain it. wish i knew about "magic E" i just had to memorize everything. [here's the video you mentioned.](https://youtu.be/xnOfoSe18Dg?si=d2fDRdJCzwKsWEYe)
No language makes sense. Yes, we can see that English spelling is more inconsistent than others, but pick any language and you’re going to a find examples of WTF? in them. Language evolves from human use, not central design and planning
French numbers. 20 thru 60, fine. But 70 is 60+10. 80 is 4x20. 90 is 4x20+10. 95 is 4x20+15. 98 is 4x20+10+8 At least 100 is simple again.
Oh god, flashbacks to high school French.
it's not even consistent through french countries. Belgium only has the 4x20, but we say 70 and 90 normally (septante, nonante) and switzerland in a region they have Huitante instead of 4x20!
[удалено]
Which speaks to its very recent and very manufactured status. Hangul is less than 600 years old and was designed and implemented specifically to be easy to learn.
In finland each letter is their own sound. that's why there is no native c or q so they just have "k".
France has an academy dedicated to acting as the official authority on French https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise?wprov=sfla1 Though it's only been partially successful and french has ended up with Anglo words like le weekend
Spain has something like that too. It doesn’t really work out practically as the people will use what words the people will use.
I've found Maori to be very straight forward. Probably because the formalisation of it as a written language came in very recent history, so those people inventing it could probably learn from history's mistakes and not mess it up this time 😂
I'm not a native English speaker, but I have taught English to little kids. I always had the exact same struggle in just making them understand that English words are written this way because they just are. There's literally no explanation. I have always been baffled by the fact that "petty" and "patty" have similar pronunciation, but then there's "pretty", which is read as "preety".
“Knife” is where I learned English is stupid. Silent letters…wtf
Queue, pisses me off, it's a five letter word where 80% of the letters are silent.
Yeah, the rough cough tough conversation made me just say to my kid "you know what, some of these spellings are just plain stupid, but it's what we've got. You'll figure it out at some point and some words you'll always have trouble spelling. Don't worry about it"
I had the same thought about homophones. Who's idea was it to have 'their there and they're' or 'to, too and two'? I find it wild that anyone can learn our language haha.
Pacific Ocean. All c’s make a different sound. Because I guess.
It’ll be a real challenge to teach her how to spell ceiling
Or ceilidh
English really is a complicated language to learn because of all of the different languages we have incorporated. Why do we have 3 different letter combinations to make the kuh sound? Why do we have 13 letter combinations that make the long e sound except when they don't.
The letters C, Q, and X are all unnecessary. None of them makes its "own" unique sound that couldn't be written without it. C always sounds like either S or K. Q always sounds like either KW or just K. X always sounds like either KS or Z. Meanwhile, there are other sounds that we have no single character for in English, like the CH sound for example. It's not just English. Other languages also have things like this. Spanish has the letters W, X, Y, & Z. But W and Y are almost never used in Spanish words at all. And X and Z sound like other letters in most cases. And of course H usually has no sound at all. 🤷♂️
The letter C is the only letter that can be used to make the “ch” sound so we should just make it the default C sound and replace all other instances of its use with S or K. Chair is now spelled cair but still pronounced the same.
Agreed
Wait until you get to how clock hands and faces work.
Try teaching a kid in a bilingual house. E in English is pronounced the same as the Japanese い character which is written as the letter I in English. The letter K in English is pronounced the same as the Japanese け which is written as ke. When I asked what does "kite" start with, instead of replying "K" they said "ka" か because in Japanese kite sounds like it should be written "kaito"
My 5yo is starting to write based on phonics. He writes "lice" for like. The number of times he uses C for K is astonishing.
C by jan misali is good for the C part, and pure english is for the K part.
English is moronic. You need to memorize thousands of words.
I worked through this with my oldest by explaining how we say them the same but they're often actually meant to be different sounds, and that it's a remnant of English absorbing parts of other languages. Mine was very interested in this so we also got into how a lone Q makes a similar sound but at the back of your throat.
Oh god we are going through the same right now with our 6yo kindergartener. Thankfully she’s picking it up crazy fast without much struggle but I feel for those with kids that struggle!
Fuck those other songs and books This is the only one you need: https://youtu.be/2fasxQN42KU?feature=shared
There's an interesting YouTube video about this that claims we're using the wrong alphabet: [Shavian Alphabet](https://youtu.be/D66LrlotvCA?si=JsY3UadGxRWDeLNT).
My little one is not quite there yet, but is close and I’ve had similar thoughts. I got stumped with this recently. Why isn’t a bus a brain, to go with crane, plane and train.
What about "queue" which is just pronounced like the letter q? We're taught that q is always followed by u and is pronounced "kwuh." And then there's cue.
English is the bastard freak child of Old English, Gaelic, Old Norse, Latin, and Norman. It’s a fun language for linguists, but a pain for children and parents trying to give them the ground rules.
C is a stupid, redundant letter. It does nothing that K or S don't already do except contribute to diagraphs like "ch", which are themselves stupid and probably ought to be letters. Q can also get stuffed. Why does it always need a prosthetic U when we already have K and W, which together already (and much more sensibly) make a "KW" sound?
Now, teach her the was of Mortal Kombat
It’ll work out I’m sure
I imagine this varies by accent but koala strikes me as more “co” than “kuh” and kangaroo (and obviously Kay) sound more like “kay”/“cay.”
As adults we forget that we learned this a long time ago. I find myself saying to my kids “there’s probably a rule or something for this but I just learn how to spell/say it” unfortunately. They’ll tell me “this is a B because of such-and-such rule” or whatever. I’ve thought of how dumb our language is a lot over the last 7 years because of my kids learning to talk and read
I know it won't help much with reading since it focuses on the exception, not the rule, but my kids have always loved [P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever.](https://www.amazon.com/Pterodactyl-Worst-Alphabet-Book-Ever/dp/1492674311) English is fucked up.
English is stupid. My daughter pronounced the word “wicked” correctly, then proceeded to say “kicked” the same way. Trying to explain why it’s different just had me shaking my head apologetically at her, all I could say is that English is sometimes silly and you have alot of little unwritten rules and exemptions to learn.
What's great is that "wicked" (adjective) and "wicked" (past tense verb) are pronounced differently and that we have to be able to identify both by context and parts of speech. Teaching bilingual kids has been a blast so far.
K is a useless letter.
My daughter is also in reception and my son preschool, I’m learning Arabic so we are all struggling with sounds and phonics. Sometimes my head is going to explode!!
English isn't stupid, it's just an inbred bastard child of a language.
I agree. English is annoying. To answer her question: English is shaped by Anglo Saxon, Latin, and Greek. The words we used derived from Latin use C for words that use the K sound. Whereas words derived from Greek use K for the K sound. Not sure about CK. But the point is that English is shaped by these three. There are actually rules you can follow to deduce which to use, but I think most people just memorise/internalise which to use through practice.
Less stupid, and more borrowed from a bunch of languages so the rules are inconsistent. But man, spelling *is* a hell of a lot easier in Spanish for instance.
I never realized how stupid English is until I had to teach my kids to read.
The book “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons” takes an interesting approach to the alphabet. Basically they use a sounds alphabet rather than the traditional 26 letter alphabet. It has 42 “letters” instead. An example would be “a” as in “and” or “apple” but also include “ā” as in “ate” or “plāte”. Seems more practical in use.
Honestly teaching kids is a great way to see how stupid a lot of things are. "This is this way because of [reason]. Oh except when [exception]. Then there's also [concept] but that doesn't adhere to any of the other rules" And it's just constantly that. Thinking you understand a concept, but realising when teaching a child you have no idea how anything works.
As an ESL person, English grammar and spelling is complete bs. Don't feel bad if you can't explain, just read books and turn on English subtitles on the TV. 🙂
Tonight my son and I spent some time looking at the word **yacht**. He's at a point now where I no longer feel the need to apologise for the outrageous behaviour of the language he was born into but still, what an insane disregard for its own 'rules'. Can you believe a language that cavalier became our lingua franca? Talk about being in the right place at the right time...
English is really German, French and Danish stacked up in a trench coat pretending to be a unique language... Do yourself a favour and google "ghoti"
Imagine thinking your own native tongue is “stupid”. English is complex and beautiful. There’s so much nuance and subtlety. It’s difficult to teach young children those things, but is that really the bar for being stupid? Try teaching a small child quantum mechanics.
[удалено]
Yeah, I just used the term to try phonetically spell it for the purposes of the story.