The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language

Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by mlboss on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:48AM (#21824722)

Problem is English is not a phonetic language. There is not much you can do with only 26 characters. In my native language you pronounce what you wrote.

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Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by StavrosK on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:55AM (#21824793)

There are phonetic (or near-phonetic) languages that use 26 (or fewer) characters. Spanish comes to mind.

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Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by hellofunk on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @04:28PM (#21829672)

Ha! The number of letters has nothing to do with it, as evidenced by maaaany other languages that are phonetic with no more letters.

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Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by digitalsushi on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:53AM (#21824766)

I feel like if we had rules in place from the start, we could do everything with half as many characters.

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Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by bluGill on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @08:57AM (#21824815)

Actually we need twice as manager characters, but we would need a lot less in any given words. Even decided Capital and lower case were different letters not different ways to write the same letter we would still need more symbols.

However that wouldn't help either. As a Mid-westerner I pronounce "about" differently from someone from Boston (they do something like a-boat). We no longer can reform spelling unless we also reform pronunciation as well.

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Re:The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language by MagnumOpus on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @12:12PM (#21826956)

German or Spanish manage to have extremely divergent dialects while still having phonetic spelling of the standard written dialect.

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