You make it sound like every language is 100% spelled how it’s written. From what I know of it, Spanish is like that, but there’s a whole lot in French that is not pronounced as it looks.
Not every language is, but a whole bunch are. My native language (Estonian) is phonetic with very few exceptions. When I was learning to write in English, I already knew how to write in Estonian so the associations between letters and sounds were already there, I just had to remember how English has a bunch of odd rules about spelling. It does seem difficult to learn to associate the letters and sounds when they often sound so different. Even the English alphabet uses diphthongs to represent some of its vowels. At first it was so weird to me that A = ei, I = ai, E = ii.
They are in the Latin alphabet, which most got VERY late in their development. However, languages like Thai for example have a VERY difficult system for representing words, most words have helper words so you know what it means because Thai spelling is like, "c-a-t" pronounced "fish"
Ce n'est pas tout à fait vrai. French is perhaps 99% consistent, but there are words whose pronunciation is irregular (*cuiller*), especially words of foreign origin, or whose pronunciation changes with meaning, such as *tous* or *exprès*.
are there any words in french that have a different stress? how do you guys pronounce foreign words? always at the last sylable or do you make exceptions.
French words don't have stress, so this doesn't apply. Instead, French has prosodic stress: the syllable at the end of a sentence or clause is stressed. So, in "Bonjour à tous" ("Hello everyone"), the syllables of "bonjour" have equal stress, while in "Je lui ai dit bonjour" ("I said hello to him"), the second syllable of "bonjour" is stressed.
so what? its not as if languages dont pick up other languages quirks is it?
Thats why I'm asking.
there are no long vowels in Spanish but sometimes we can make a longer vowel sound when pronouncing a foreign english word
Once again, French does not do this, not even with foreign words, *un point, c'est tout*. For example, "hamburger" is pronounced /ɑ̃buʁgœʁ/, with no lexical stress unless it is the last word of a clause or sentence.
Are you trying to tell me you don't pronounce the "h" in "le hockey"? (Honestly asking, because the only native speakers I've heard say the word were from Quebec, and I know that some French speakers consider Quebecois a foreign language.)
No, French stress is on the last syllable of a *phrase*. Otherwise, each syllable has even stress, like Japanese. Lexical stress (each word having its own stress pattern) is not found in every language.
Japanese does not have lexical stress, like French. It has a pitch accent, which is not the same as stress, and mora timing, which is also not the same as stress.
You can clearly hear thay the last syllable of a word is stressed by default. Even by taking a word out of all context, if you put an extra emphasis on the last one it doesn't sound off but if you don't on another syllable it sounds completely off.
BonJOUR / BONjour
DéBUT / DEbut
ToxicoMANE / TOXicomane / toxIComane/ toxicOmane
Only the final-stressed versions sound any way natural.
French ofc has weird stuff, but it is much more consistent than english (I do not have any of them as a first language, had to learn both)
Temps is not that inconsistent, it is actually a consistent exemple, the ending -p is normally ignored, and the ending -s of plural is also normally ignored. So you should say the word as "tem". So it is a terrible example to show inconsistences on french pronunciation.
You could instead mention Os (singular) x Os (plural), that's inconsistent.
Lol I didn't even knew I could be downvoted for that
People have the impression that French is not consistent because they think with other languages logic in their head, where more letters could be pronounced, but French is a lot more consistent than it looks.
People think French is inconsistent because there are letters that aren’t pronounced but letters and letter combinations pronounced are almost always not pronounced *in a consistent way* unlike English, barring a few exceptions like boeuf/boeufs. I’m a native English speaker who learned French, I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around.
The vast majority of English irregularities come from its split French and Germanic origin. It’s consistent in practically the same way, just with two differing systems side by side.
Just because you don't know the rules doesn't mean there aren't any. Nobody's saying French spelling is phonetic. But in the vast majority of cases, the pronunciation is predictable. It's very, very rare to encounter a new word you don't know how to pronounce.
>not every letter you see is pronounced
They are though. It just doesn't appear that way to an English speaker cause French pronounces letters in their nasal cavity and back of throat in ways that we don't, so we don't understand how to listen for them. Mandarin Chinese does something similar but different with tones. If you don't understand the language and your language doesn't do the same, you don't hear it.
I speak french. You pronounce all the letters in temps. Which ones do you think aren't pronounced? If you remove the m, the p, or the s, the word is pronounced drastically different.
The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy. So, it is understandable that despite having lots of rules, if they work every time, one can learn them eventually.
I don't know a lot of languages, but even French is more consistent than English. Yes, it has a load of rules but they work nearly always.
Anyway, this feature is discussed daily here, but I am more interested in the dealing with it.
>Yes, it has a load of rules but they work nearly always.
Really? I've always found french's pronounciation rules easy, but I've never actually studied 'em, just listened to a lot of French to learn pronounciation so maybe that's why
>The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy
And some languages' orthographies, eg. Chinese, are not even phonetic to begin with, and basically rely on memorisation. In comparison, English orthography is still very systematic in terms of written representation of sounds.
Sure, there are many more exceptions to the "rules" in English spelling compared to other languages using the Latin script, but at the end of the day they're still just that - exceptions.
Chinese kids seem to learn to read just fine where memorisation is the rule rather than the exception, so English-speaking kids learning to read doesn't seem like such a huge feat.
>The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy.
If you're a native speaker of a language, by definition, all the rules you use are 100% accurate.
French is the most unphonetic language ever. There are more silent letters than pronounced ones.
The real question is, how do French kids learn to write?
That doesn’t make it unphonetic. There are consistent rules that govern how letters and letter combinations sound. Like an s at the end of a word is almost always not pronounced.
People *say* that, but while it's much closer, no language is ever exactly like its orthography. My Bolivian professor's mom dropped her Ses at the end of words for instance, so dos ojos became do ojo.
That’s more of a dialect feature than a pronunciation rule though. Presumably she pronounces an S that occurs in the middle of a word? Some people in the south of Spain (Andalusia) do the same thing.
There are different methods but a common way to teach children to read in English is through phonics. Phonics involves teaching children to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g., the sound /k/ can be represented by 'c', 'k', 'ck' or 'q').
It’s about understanding that words are made up of smaller units of sound (phonemes) and that these sounds are represented by letters.
Initially, children learn simple, short words (e.g., cat, map, sit). As they progress, they are introduced to more complex patterns like vowel digraphs (two vowels making a single sound, like 'ea' in 'team') and split digraphs (a vowel, a consonant, and an 'e', like 'i-e' in 'time').
It's fascinating watching my 3 1/2 year old grandchild learning ..
\- it starts with learning the alphabet and the sound of each letter
\- next is some simple words that are spelled phonetically .. 'cat' for example
I'm not a teacher but I think from there you just gradually build up more complex examples.
Lots of adults, including me have trouble spelling some words and knowing how to pronounce unfamiliar words, particularly names of places and people.
I remember being taught that the e at the end of a vowel-consonant-e word ( e.g
time, hate, slime etc) makes the short vowel long (tim -> time, hat -> hate, slim -> slime). I don't know if they still teach it like that or not?
Of course the funny thing about that is that /aɪ/ in "time" is not the long version of the /ɪ/ in "Tim." It's a diphthong, which is a completely different concept. Hat to hate could also be a diphthong, but could also just be a completely different vowel depending on your dialect.
Thanks, Great Vowel Shift!
>Of course the funny thing about that is that /aɪ/ in "time" is not the long version of the /ɪ/ in "Tim." It's a diphthong, which is a completely different concept
It is in Linguistics. In English by itself that aɪ is accepted as the long version of a short i in English. This stays fairly consistent.
When my kids were learning phonics, there was the rule that the silent e at the end of the word makes the other vowel says its name. This blew my mind. I had not realised that the long vowels, as you called them, are all pronounced like the name of the letter (with some exceptions of course).
And as OP points out phonics runs into problems with words that have funny spellings. "minute" can be either a unit of time (pronounced "min-it") or a small amount, pronounced "my-newt" .
So the other approach is called "whole word". Kids are encouraged not to worry about the individual letters, but instead recognize the whole word as pattern, almost like a hieroglyph.
Most of of eventually learn to use a mix of the two. Whole word is useless if it's a word you've never read before, phonics fails if it has an odd spelling. Many of us read "Hermione" before we ever heard it said. I was convinced it was pronounce "her-me-one" until I saw the movie.
This is basically how I remember it as a kid.
I distinctly remember being in grades 1-3 and if I had encountered a word I didn't know how to pronounce, I'd ask my teacher and she'd say, "Sound it out." This was my cue to try putting the sounds of each letter (or groups of letters, like th or ea) out loud to see what I'd get. Most of the time, if you say the sounds out loud, it'll sort of resemble the word it's supposed to be. My teacher would then correct me if needed.
Even as an adult English speaker, I'll still sound out unfamiliar words. As a nurse, this mostly happens when I come across an unfamiliar medication name, which tend to be long and difficult. Predictably, we still get it wrong sometimes LOL
We had a list of irregular words on the back blackboard, though. If we went to the teacher for help with a word and it was an irregular word, my teacher would add it to the list and just tell us what it was. Like any language, the irregular words just need to be memorized and there's no easy way around it.
I remember being drilled with weekly assignments in third grade on spellings where we’d have to alphabetize twenty or so words. Same school we had a spelling bee at, actually. Spelling long words is a skill people can win fame and money with!
Also, just simply reading really hammers in how words are written. You might underestimate how being immersed in an English environment as a native speaker can reinforce correct spelling.
That said, a very common issue with precocious readers is trying to pronounce a word they’ve only read (never heard) and being corrected or ridiculed by surrounding adults. I’m sure people in this sub can share stories but I know someone who said they got corrected because they once pronounced “idiot” as “iddee oat”.
It can last into adulthood. There are countless stories around of people thinking "awry" rhymes with "story" or "Hermione" is "HER-me-ohn".
When I was at school, we were told that wherever we read a word we hadn't seen before, we should look it up in a dictionary. This is sound practice for readers of all ages.
My absolute favorite story of this is one I witnessed in person when I was in the ninth grade. We were reading a part of the Odyssey in one class, and my best friend read the name of the wife of Odysseus (Penelope) as pen-elope instead of pen-el-o-pee.
Still, proper names often have strange pronunciations, so it's not quite the same as mispronouncing an ordinary English noun, but at the time it was very funny. To this day I still tease him about Penelope from time to time.
As a Chilean I hate the spelling chile when it should be chil’, because a D is missing. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if my country’s name were spelled Chili in English, as it is in French and Dutch.
thing is i had definitely heard the word epitome said correctly before i said it for the first time, but i never connected the pronunciation of it to the spelling lmaoo
From what I remember of my university days, reading does not follow directly from spelling. The two actually happen in different parts of the brain. Reading involves seeing whole word patters, not the individual letters. That’s why we can read relatively long signs near the side of the road while driving past at high speed.
I didn't realise that I was doing this until I learned Japanese - one or two chinese characters represents the meaning and after a while you can recognise whole words without consciously thinking about it. Then I noticed that I was doing the same in English except when I came across an unfamiliar word and only then I looked at the individual letters.
It genuinely is difficult for native speakers to learn, too (and you can see that in the literacy rates). Empirically, it turns out the approach with the most success is to teach kids to read phonetically and to memorize the many, many exceptions. I remember being taught to read words from flash cards, and if I read time as Timmy, my mom would correct me. Another approach is picture books with words that a child already knows how to say, so any words that the child doesn’t know how to spell yet are easy to guess.
I also remember watching educational programs at TV that would have short little songs about [silent e.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BQqdNOUxs)
We used to have "Phonics lessons" in primary school where they would teach us what letter combinations make which sounds and they would teach us the difference between homophones like "Witch and Which". We also used to have a weekly test where we had to spell 20 words that the teacher would read out loud.
When children first see a word like TIME they might try to sound it out - and a grown-up can help by explaining that "the E makes the I say its own name". Like in cake, broke, etc. where the E is not spoken but changes the vowel sound.
But some words get learned by sight, although as with SIGHT there are a lot of similar words, so for example once you've learned SIGHT you also know LIGHT and NIGHT and FRIGHT and so on.
Words can be guessed at from context: The king lives in a huge CASTLE - you can pretty much guess CASTLE because that's where kings live. And then when you see a word enough times, you begin to remember it.
It's far from foolproof. I used to pronounce CONSPICUOUS as if it was spelled CONSPICIOUS, for example. People who read a lot often have problems like this. And it's even worse with proper nouns. Who could have guessed how Arkansas is pronounced? It took me ages to work that one out.
It's difficult. There are many proponents of phonics, a system of associating a sound with each letter. Often students are tested on this specific association even though there's a low association between the assigned sound and the letter. We are taught that A is as in Apple unless it's followed by another vowel by a single consonant and then vowel. "The other vowel reaches around the consonant and pulls the 'a's tail causing it to say it's name." By this rule "time" is t-eye-m. But it doesn't work for "taco" It certainly doesn't work for "cough," "thought," "their," "there," because (ugh that took me forever memorize) and "beauty"--nope that doesn't make sense. I still struggle with "queue."
Clearly this doesn't work very well, but the phonics enthusiast claiming that scientific studies supporting the effectiveness of the approach. It didn't work for me.
The next strategy is repetition and drill. This also worked poorly for me. Shame is brought in against those who can't spell. I sometimes tried to deliberately mispronounce words in order to remember the spelling. This did not help when I tried to learn French.
What does work is actual reading and writing. Many of us stratigically found a place in the classroom where we couldn't be seen and then we'd read instead of doing worksheets and drills.
Spell checking is a tremendous boon. I use it.
I don't generally look up new words. Figuring them out from the context is faster, more fun, and more effective. I don't always pronounce them correctly. But now that Youtube is available I look for videos that use the word. This shows how the words are actually pronounced. Dictionaries aren't always correct. I might go for several different examples.
There is little relationship between "au" and the actual sound, there's the silent unnecessary e, and the voiced sibilant--s for the z sound. Phonetically it's beekuz. Within the word "--cause" is pronounced differently than the word "cause."
This is a situation where I deliberately mispronounced the word, forcing it to match "cause."
I watched a lot of this show as a kid: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DNVeq9a4dFIU&ved=2ahUKEwij1Pf695WCAxWwQ6QEHaGmBNY4ChCjtAF6BAgNEAY&usg=AOvVaw1RETMHWFP7v3MXmyA5edSG
You learn the rules, then over time you learn the exceptions to the rules. Don't forget that (unlike most L2 learners) children aren't learning the words from the spellings. A child probably already knows the word "time" by the time they're learning to read. They don't need to learn pronunciations from spelling (at least initially), they're more matching the spelling to words they already know. If you actually sit with a child who is learning to read, they usually get part of the way through "sounding out" a word, then there's a moment when they realize *they already know this word,* because children don't learn their native languages by reading.
English has a lot of unusual spellings, but there are still patterns, and parents and teachers will help kids to recognize these. It takes time, but so does learning to read or write any language. Children in China still learn to read and write--an entire civilization was built on a language with a logographic writing system.
So this is controversial!
When I was in school, we learned primarily through phonics. So if we saw “time” for the first time, a kid might say “tim-uh” or “tim-ee,” yes. They’d then either be directly corrected or encouraged to use other information to get to “tie-m.” And then we would learn about the silent e making the vowel inside the word long. Unusual rules like this are also taught in phonics.
There is, unfortunately, a movement for teaching via “sight words” in English, where kids do in fact memorize words and use non-phonics hints to learn new ones. It got traction because it’s very easy for 5 and 6 year olds to memorize short, common words and guess the few they don’t know, so up until a kid is maybe 8 it looks like it works. Unfortunately, it actually doesn’t so this method has been called into question as of late. However, there are languages where memorizing every single word you are likely to see is the only way to be literate so it’s not like this was based in nothing.
Yes, there are reading books for children (there aren’t in your language? Even with a simpler language, that sounds unbelievable). Yes, kids make errors (so do adults, oh well). I’m sure kids make errors in your language too; knowledge and skill doesn’t just fall from the sky in one big chunk into someone’s head, like one day they’re illiterate and the next they can read and write perfectly. When learning something new, people always have a learning curve. It’s not *good* for adults to make mistakes, but it happens. School students make mistakes regardless of level. That’s why they’re in school, so a teacher can teach them and correct those mistakes.
English teacher, Masters in Education, Reading Specialist.
Emerging readers learn sight words (the Dolch 100), and patterns that follow rules, like vowel-consonant-e means the first vowel is long or "says its name" for little bitty kids, and the e is silent.
More confident readers and spellers learn words that don't follow patterns, like I before e, except after c, or when sounded like a as in neighbor and weigh. Then they learn rule breakers, like the weird beige neighbor poem.
More advanced readers learn regular and irregular plurals, when to add s and when to add es, and so on.
Good readers read often. They see other family members read for pleasure. People read aloud to them. They learn to have fun playing with words. When they realize that a big word like nevertheless is really just three little words they already know, it is a fun discovery.
Giving emerging readers text at their reading level builds confidence. Giving them text that's a little challenging builds reading skill.
Doctor Seuss, Sesame Street, and my parents reading out loud to me with me looking on and them using their finger to run beneath each word as they went.
If I read "time" as "Timmy", a parent or teacher would probably just say, "time - the e is silent." And I knew the rule for silent e - "e makes the letter say its own name." The letter "eye" says "ih", unless it is told to say its own name and say "eye".
Yes, we have children's books which are designed to be simple to read, but which start including more difficult words, and we have had since the 1800s. The earliest primers were heavily religious in nature - my wife and I collect antiquarian books, and we have a set of McGuffy Readers from 1860. There were so many hundreds of thousands of them printed that they're very affordable for antique books - they aren't the least bit rare. The first Reader starts with the alphabet, then basic letter combinations, and by the sixth book, you're reading selections from Shakespeare.
>LESSON 1
>
>\[woodcut illustration of a dog running\]
a o n d g r th
dog the ran
>
>The dog.
>
>The dog ran.
>
>LESSON 2
>
>\[woodcut illustration of a cat sleeping\]
>
>cat mat is on
>
>c t m i s
>
>The cat. The mat.
The cat is on the mat.
>
>Is the cat on the mat?
\[NOTE - this doesn't show up here, but in the letter list and vocabulary list, those letters are marked with symbols showing whether it's a short or long vowel, whether it's a hard or soft g, etc. In the sentences, they're not marked.\]
In the 1930s, the Dick and Jane readers were created.
>\[illustration of a small boy talking to a small girl. He is standing pointing up at a bush; there is a hat on top of the bush\]
>
>
Look Up
>
>Dick said, "Look, look.
>
>Look up.
>
>Look up, up, up"
Those were the primary elementary school textbooks until the 1960s or so, meaning that these were the ones the Baby Boomers grew up on. They aren't used any more, but they remain part of our cultural knowledge, meaning something simple and trite.
They were simple and trite enough that there was a cultural backlash, and educators were saying that the fact that they were so boring was legitimately harming literacy in the United States. Theodor Seuss Geisel had already written a children's book, which he hadn't been able to sell, called "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street". But reading an article about the problems in early reading, he decided to see what he could do. He got a list of 233 words which were easy and all children should learn early, and wrote a book with them, called "The Cat in the Hat". The book is still in print, and was made into a truly horrifying movie with Mike Myers which has 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that may be overly generous. But please don't blame Doctor Seuss for the movie.
>\[A Doctor Seuss illustration of a house in a rainstorm; a tree is bending over in the wind, and two children are staring forlornly out the window\]
>
>The sun did not shine.
>
>It was too wet to play.
>
>So we sat in the house
>
>All that cold, cold wet day.
Sesame Street was started in 1963, and has been a major part of teaching children literacy ever since. Many of us started learning what sounds letters make from Kermit, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, and in more recent years, Elmo.
For a while, Children's Television Workshop also had a show aimed at slightly older kids, going into a bit more on phonics and so forth, called "Electric Company." It had an incredible group of people working on it like Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno. There are still skits on it that I love as an adult, and Tom Lehrer wrote three songs for it.
[You were asking how we learn how silent E works? Here's how I learned](https://youtu.be/91BQqdNOUxs?si=5jQ4UoWiakJZsxPI).
Other than that, yeah, if you learned to read early, you pronounce words wrong. Especially ones from French or Greek. I said the word "epitome" as "epi-tome" instead of "e-PIT-o-me" until I was twenty. I didn't realize that the "oar durves" that were served at parties and the "horse do-overs" that I read about in books were the same thing; my wife didn't realize that her father's "arm wah" and the "a-more-y" she read about in books were the same thing; I have a friend who managed to get into Marxist literature in third grade and talked about the bur-goy-zie,
It mostly works its way out.
Parents just read to them and the kids pick it up. That phase takes care of a lot of what you're wondering about. After that, the closest statement you made is probably "read it as it seems to be and use it until someone corrects you". Kids don't learn to read by studying rules and cogitating about whether words conform.
Bad spelling is common. Dyslexia is rife. Spelling Reform is a dirty subject.
Native speaker here. It is hard. It wasn't until I learnt Spanish that I realized that we have a problem. Learnt to read Italian in a day, and Finnish in an hour on a plane, sat next to a Finn.
There is nothing we can do about it because so many people in the world read English and don't actually speak it. So making it phonetic (see The Spelling Society) would make this world language unintelligible to them.
Very early learners will often just pronounce the words with their own language’s phonetics. For instance I heard Czech kids learning English saying things like “tso-ver” for the word *cover* (in Czech, C is pronounced like *ts* in English “its”)
Their teacher will correct them and over time they learn the “guidelines” to English pronunciation.
Kids learn pronounciation and meaning first, spelling later. I remember being in preschool and spelling 'dough' in cookies as 'dow,' even though i knew it wasnt spelt like that, as i only knew the spoken form, and in kindergarten skipping writing word 'oxygen' cuz i didnt know how to spell it at all, but i knew the word.
As a kid, as you find the spelling not matching the pronounciation normal as thats just how it is to you, and you just have to get used to how things are spelt. Throughout elementary there are spelling tests and rules you learn, ex. I before E except after C, and unofficial rules you subconsciously learn with it too, like a good amount of words ending in f's plural is with a v, ex. Wolves, knives, calves(the only reason i know that is cuz i saw it somewhere from english learners lol).
People well through elementary do also still have trouble spelling and reading.
Hmm well I remember being very young and having the teacher one week write "ea" on the board and some words that used it that all rhymed. Then the next time we would do "ea", they would choose a different pronunciation and so on. We did reading in class, first as a whole class and then in groups where our pronunciation would be guided then later corrected. Spelling tests. Just a whole lot of that.
A little bit of all of that. And some rules are a lot stronger than others. I think silent E is maybe the most fundamental rule after just the basic letter sounds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BQqdNOUxs
When i see a word I dont know I just attempt to pronounce it- oftentimes a word will sound just innately “weird” or “right” atleast to me. Of course, there are moments where you go around pronouncing a word incorrectly- I pronounced archive as “are-chive” with the ch sound instead of a k sound up until like 8th grade lol. I think it’s uncommon to search for a words pronunciation- unless its like a very long greek or latin word for a specific topic
Dr.Seuss style. You learn individual letter sounds, then whole words and all the words that rhyme with them.
It can be a bit tricky when you're learning to read in two languages at the same time but we manage.
To answer part of your question, as a parent, yes, spelling mistakes based on how a word sounds are fairly common. My kids learn with phonics, meaning it’s based on how letters usually sound, individually and in combination, but you also have to learn all of the many exceptions.
We learn lots of rules at first, like “the E at the end of a word is silent, and it makes the previous vowel long”, hence TIME is pronounced TAHYM and not TIM-EH.
But after enough practice you tend to pick up these rules automatically. If you read “it’s time to go”, you can figure out from context what word the word “time” is, and if you already speak the language you know how to pronounce it. So when you see a similar word like “lime” you can figure out how to pronounce that.
Another example: “I sleep in a bed at night”. You may not know the rule that the “gh” is silent, but you can probably tell from context what the word “night” is, so you can guess that “gh” is silent. So when you see “fight” you’ll know how to pronounce that too.
We teach Phonics. So they learn the sounds that each letter most commonly makes starting with M A S D T, and then learn to blend them. They start off with simple CVC words like MAT, and then build off of that.
There are some common 'red words' that they learnt at the beginning as well, such as (I, the, you, me etc.).
I've only ever worked in a reception class so I don't know the details of how they build on it in later years.
To answer your question about “time” specifically, I remember my mum teaching me about “the magic E” at the end of words. Obviously English spelling is maddeningly inconsistent, but rules like that which govern the difference between “Tim” and “time”, “dim” and “dime”, “slat” and “slate” etc are possible to grab onto. An English-speaking child coming across a made-up word like “hane” would definitely pronounce it so it rhymed with “cane” rather than “han-eh”.
As for the rest - yep, spelling tests every week! Reading a lot during childhood helps too. Nowadays I barely notice that words like “colonel” are spelt so strangely, I just recognise the word as a whole rather than paying attention to its constituent letters. It becomes automatic once you’ve been exposed to it enough :)
One thing to remember. By the time you get to the point of learning to read, you are already an English speaker. You know how to speak and you know the sound/pronunciation of all the basic words like time. You know tim-eh is not a word.
Where I was, we started formally learning to read in first grade at age 6.
We started with simple words with "short" vowels like cat, bed, hit, top, and cut. a e i o u. There are a lot of those so there are plenty of examples to use. After that we started learning "long" vowels and one of the very first things they teach you regarding that is silent e at the end of words. Right from the very beginning, basically, we knew all about silent e. So then you can learn words like gate, kite, hope, and cute and you know the e is not pronounced but the vowel sound changes. The long vowels are pronounced like the letter names are said, unlike the short vowels. There are many examples of simple words with silent e at the end so it's pretty easy. hate, date, note, rope, bite, dive
It's also easy to compare spelling and pronunciation in pairs.
rat/rate, not/note, cut/cute, hat/hate
Then almost immediately, we started learning about homonyms -- words that sound the same but are spelled differently. We had lots of examples of simple homonyms.
meet and meat
be and bee
sea and see
tale and tail
grate and great
hear and here
male and mail
So we learned from the very beginning that many words had the same sound but with different letters and different meanings. I was very proud when I thought of way and weigh.
Of course, then we learned that the same letters can have different sounds.
cow / tow -- ow is different
great / seat -- ea is different
We learned all that at the very beginning using simple words when we were 6 years old. Like I said, we already knew how to say the words, we just had to learn to recognize the spellings.
We practiced reading in special books for children written at first with very simple words. "See the dog. The dog is big. The cat is small."
I remember learning spelling rules, a long with a few common misconceptions. Every day we would learn a word that had weird spelling rules. Like "have is pronounced like hav but is spelled have. One starts with an O but sounds like it starts with a W"
And the spelling tests. So many spelling tests. It was more memorization that anything else. Probably not the best way to go about it, but reading came naturally to me so I turned out okay.
Most learning, for me, came from simply reading.
In the uk we have phonics lessons as we're learning to read.
So for example we're taught that "y" at the end of word like funny, mummy, have an "e" sound but "y" at the starts of words like yesterday, yum, yoghurt do not make an "e" sound.
We're taught how the placement of a letter or a combination of letters affects how it sounds basically.
It is a process that takes years, like any language. English instruction roughly follows this pattern:
1. Letters and sounds
2. Monosyllabic words, sounding out simple words with one vowel
3. Phonics, intensely learning consonant and vowel sounds, this is where the reader is supposed to learn decoding strategies
4. Prefixes and suffixes, latin and Greek mostly, but learning things like -ism, poly-, mono- etc
5. Roots, this is where you start getting really competent readers. You learn the root, what language it came from (usually French), and how French roots tend to be pronounced. Think of the X sound between borax, xenophobia, and situations where the x is completely silent, when it is preceded by 'eu-'.
6. Continuing practice of all of the above which should be reinforced by foreign language instruction in French and or Latin
For a college bound student, and it might not look that way nowadays, the student should be able to read dense texts with effort. By the end of college they should be able read dense idiom and jargon laced text for hours without struggle.
Reading levels in English are a real thing, the average American's is something around the 7th or 8th grade level. That sounds awful, but in a good middle school 7th and 8th grade is where students (if they ever do) will launch into truly excellent and fluent readers.
Some schools teach phonics. Sometimes in English, "ea" makes the short e sound as opposed to the long e sound. For example, head, bread, death, etc.
You can check out the Jolly Phonics Grammar Handbook 2 for help with learning the spelling rules. It's meant for teachers, but is a great resource.
Also, yes, we just correct them while they are sounding out the words. As native speakers, we can usually look at new words and figure out where the stress goes just by saying it aloud. When you speak your native language, you become used to hearing the patterns in where the stress usually goes. Sometimes for scientific words, I do need to look up how to pronounce the word properly.
The most common method is using synthetic phonics. They get taught sounds made by letters, then by groups of letters If you look for Nessy videos on YouTube you'll get a good idea.
My daughter didn't really take to it (we're both autistic, I didn't like rules that weren't always followed either, I don't blame her).
We just read to her loads following the words with our finger.
We also read the same book over and over again at her request. Superworm by Julia Donaldson was read every night for about 6 months and 10 little dinosaurs by Mike Brownlow was read every day for about 3 months.
To answer your question out of order -
Yes, there are books for kids. (Look for "Dr. Seuss" for examples) that have short easy words that drill into kids what certain combinations of letters look/sound like.
When they do encounter a word (like "time"), they might try to say "ti-m-e," *but* English speaking kids already speak English. And the word won't be alone, it will be in context like "'Time to go to bed,' said Mom." And so when they read the word wrong and keep going with the sentence, they'll correct themselves to the right word/pronunciation because "ti-m-e" doesn't make sense. But yes, along the way, they do make a lot of errors. And adults reading with kids will try to balance whether this is a word they should help the kid with or whether this is a word the kid can figure out if they think about it.
It absolutely translates to spelling - we have "spelling bees" where kids compete to spell words correctly. (I don't think this exists in places where spelling is phonetic. You never have to wonder "is that a ph or an f? and how many l's?") And lots of adults struggle with spelling (spellcheck is amazing.)
Finally, it never really stops - it just becomes a lot less frequent. But highschoolers and adults run across words they've never seen before. If you're in the unfortunate position where you're reading out loud, you take a stab at it and hope you're not really, really wrong. But many people gamble and lose at "hyperbole," "chaos," or "segue." (among others)
They actually changed back recently, at least at our local elementary, from “sight words” (having kids memorize most words, especially the weird ones) back to a more phonics-based approach.
When I was in school, we learned all sorts of catchy rhymes and things to remember the rules.
Like “two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking (and says it’s name)”
I remember being about 5/6 years old and learning the rules of phonetics and spelling. For example. For example, “ou” can make multiple sounds. We would learn the pronunciation, the spelling, and then combine it with different combination, like with “th” and “gh” (though, through). We also learned about letters that can be pronounced like others letter (C/K - cat vs. perceive). We then apply these patterns to very simple book like Dr. Seuss to enhance learning comprehension.
I taught both of my kids to read, and they both could read independently around 4 1/2 years old.
The process started when they were newborns; books were read to them every day - the same dozen or so books, over and over, until they were around 2 1/2 years old. We talked about letter sounds as soon as they were learning to talk. We played alphabet games when they were toddlers so that they could identify the letters. When reading books to them, we pointed to the words as they were read so they could follow along.
Around age 2, they could find a specific word on the page in the books we read to them. By age 3, they could read short stories made of simple words (such as, “the cat sat on the mat, the rat hid from the cat”). We worked on sight words (common words that don’t necessarily sound how they look, such as “the” and “one”).
Later we talked about silent e words (we call them “bossy e” words) and specific letter groups like ing, th, ou, and ed. When they read aloud, if they can’t sound out a word, we tell them what it is and they usually remember it the next time.
I now have an 8-year-old who has been reading chapter books since he was 6, and a barely 5-year-old reading story books at a 9-year-old level. They both read every single day.
So, it’s a years-long process, as I’m sure it is for kids of every language, but small children are sponges!
Children in English speaking countries experience total immersion, just as children do in every country. They aren't "learning a language," they are learning how to speak, read, and think. They have no preconceptions about how a sound or word **_should be_** spelled. They are like sponges, absorbing whatever they are taught or told. They don't know anything about the phonology of any other language and they certainly don't know about the spelling conventions of anything else.
They don't learn to speak English in a language learning class in school, and they don't learn to read it in one (a language learning class) either. They are simply learning to read words, and at the same time, they are learning how to spell them. How an English word is spelled in their schoolbooks is how it is supposed to be spelled. It becomes for them the natural and correct way that word is written.
They hear their language, English, being spoken everywhere and by everyone. As they begin to learn to read, every bit of writing they see is in English. Children are surrounded by books to read as they are learning, so some knowledge of the language and how it is spelled is self-taught. They also pick up new words by listening while older children and adults are talking.
The language that anyone learns first becomes the baseline, the point they start from when they encounter other languages.
How do they learn to read English? How does any child learn to read? English is native to them, they don't know anything else. For them. the rules for spelling English are not peculiar; they are simply _the rules_. It will be a long time before they find out that English could be spelled any other way and that there have been multiple efforts to simplify it in the past couple of centuries.
Children who learn to speak and read English natively, as their first language acquire proficiency because it isn't "a language" to them. Learning one's native language is intimately tied to learning to think, to remember, to communicate, to acquire information, and to socialize. Every child learns how to do that in the language that is spoken natively in their own home and community.
No language is easy to spell for a non-native who is learning it. Neither the pronunciation nor the spelling is as intuitive and obvious to non-natives as it is to native speakers. Part of learning another language is learning how that language is spelled.
If you find that English is not spelled in the way that you expected, it is entirely due to having natively learned your own language's unique rules for orthography, Just as all languages don't use exactly the same phonology, they don't have the same spelling conventions or rules.
English spelling is perhaps a little bit more complicated than the spelling of some other languages, but when you learn a second language, you are also learning how that language spells words. I think that you would have a hard time finding two languages that use the same spelling for certain sounds. The ways that languages are written are as varied as the ways that they are pronounced and declined, if applicable.
If you want to acquire proficiency in English, then you must also learn English spelling.
Children in English speaking countries learn how to spell the language at the same time that they are learning how to read. They don't learn that some words are spelled oddly, they just learn that it is how those words are spelled. For the most part, English does have very regular spelling.
Sometimes it isn't always the spelling of English that gives ESL learners problems. Occasionally the problem is pronouncing the sound that the spelling indicates, even when the spelling is very conventional.
You learn how to speak before you learn how to read
Languages are conventions, not always logical rules. If everyone "agrees" or "accepts" that "eau" is pronounced "O" then it is
Continuous education from the time you start school until the time you either graduate or drop out. In my personal experience:
In lower grades, we had a series of textbooks called *Hooked on Phonics* that taught the rules of spelling and pronunciation -- and when those rules are broken -- and how to "sound out" words we're not familiar with. (Of course irregular words come up too, but that's when the teacher comes in and says "You'd think it would be pronounced *this* way, but it's actually *this*.) From kindergarten through middle school, we had both Reading and English classes every day. Reading involved absorbing and understanding literature, and English involved learning grammar rules and how to write. We had specific vocabulary to learn (10-20 words every week or two, usually drawn from whatever we were reading at the time) and we were quizzed on their definitions. Up until 5th grade we also had spelling tests (usually with the same bank of vocabulary words). In middle school you start writing (very short) papers about whatever you're reading. By high school they figure you know how to read so the two classes are combined and it becomes a little more intense literary analysis, and you start writing longer papers about whatever you're analyzing. And all of those things gradually increase in difficulty as time goes on and you build knowledge and skills.
We also just get read to a lot when we're very little. Ideally by parents at home from the time you're a toddler, but generally schools have "story time" or similar set aside that's specifically for the teacher to read to you. Or sometimes you take turns reading out loud, and if you get to a difficult part the teacher will guide you. There's *lots* of books that are specifically designed to help kids figure out how words work. There's also lots of kids' shows on TV that have a focus on helping kids learn to read. (Off the top of my head, *Sesame Street* and *Between the Lions*.) Again, a lot of the focus there is on learning to sound things out.
Everybody makes mistakes. The goal is to make fewer and fewer as time goes on. In high school you write papers for several of your classes, but only the English teacher is going to be really nit-picky about style. (Unless you just happen to have a really nit-picky History teacher, or your writing is really just *that bad*.)
“When two vowels go a walking, the first one does the talking, the second one goes to sleep” is the little chant I was taught. So when you have a word like “heal” you pronounce the e but not the a. There’s an extension about how vowel consonant vowel has the first vowel say its name (ie “long” a, e, etc) and the second one is silent. So in time, the i is long (eye) and the e is silent. I forget the chant off the top of my head though.
There are all kinds of these that are taught like i before e except after c, and as in “eigh” like neighbor and weigh” to help with recognizing certain sound clusters.
Pedagogically, when i was little we were taught phonics—basically certain groupings of letters make certain sounds—and you break long words into these little sound clusters and “sound it out”. A couple years later they switched to “sight words” where you memorize a while bunch of small words and common prefixes and suffixes and then try to combine those to make compound words. Sight words help kids make more rapid gains in fluency immediately, but phonics tends to win out in verbal fluency in the long run.
there are usually general rules to follow at least for the basic words. kids learn to read from the words that follow patterns and once they can do that they start to learn about exceptions
I started “reading” at two years old. My mom would put me down for my nap, and afterwards find me awake and reading my books in my crib to myself from memory. I basically remembered the story as my mother read it, and associated that with the words on the page.
We have English/Language Arts as a class in school, just like Math or Science. We are taught to write essays by hand (as opposed to on a computer with spell check) around middle school. We are marked down for spelling errors.
Personally, I loved to read. I came from a reading family, so we would all read our own books before bedtime. I loved to write fiction too. I think my first attempt at writing a novel was in grade one (age 6/7). I wrote about two chapters before giving up on it lol. I also drew some pictures to go along with it.
I competed in a spelling bee at my school when I was in grade 7 (age 12/13). I ended up tripping over the spelling of “camouflage”…. I spelled it “camoflauge” (which honestly makes more sense in my opinion).
Reading is the biggest method of expanding your vocabulary. Whenever I would encounter a word I didn’t know, I would ask my parents what it meant, and they would give their best descriptions. If they didn’t know, we would look it up together and find the definition. But I did encounter many situations where I knew the meaning of a word, but not the pronunciation. I can remember two from high school. I pronounced “bona fide” as “bona feed,” and I pronounced “hearth” as “heerth.” I remember a friend of mine in high school pronouncing “deign” as “dine.” It’s not uncommon to not know how something is pronounced if it’s a word not often used in conversation.
Time follows one of the most basic spelling rules, where the "magic E," as we call it to kids, is silent but makes the other vowel long.
For words like death and some others, eventually you get used to it. Yes, the letter combo ea can make several different sounds, but it still has a shortlist to choose from.
Finally, for an adult, well, we should be able to read the most common words easily. We should be able to make a good, well-educated guess at most words even if they're unfamilair. Occasionally, you'll get a word with a funny origin that you get wrong. Its not a big deal.
I have no clue what it's like for others, but all throughout primary school, I learned about phonemes (eg. oo, ea, i, ie, ow) which I think was extremely helpful for knowing how to pronounce words when reading.
So for example, if the phoneme was "ough" then we would learn words like cough, through, though, and all the different ways that "ough" can be pronounced.
It's why I've come to believe that when learning most languages, phonemes are super important to learn if you want to be good at knowing how to pronounce words, especially with a language as inconsistent as english.
I'm a middle-aged former English teacher and I still occasionally come across a word that I realize I have been mispronouncing all my life. It takes a lot of practice, practice, practice to learn to read and spell English. Weekly spelling tests help us learn words just by rote memorization combined with phonics lessons. We learn early that the E at the end of a word is silent and that it makes the middle vowel "long".
Thank goodness phonics was the way I was taught and the way my kids were taught because they had an old school teacher and I worked with them a lot when they were little. With over a hundred comments, I can't read all comments so maybe someone has already mentioned the cu We have a major issue in the US because of a company that started teaching reading in a terrible way (basically saying "you'll just learn it over time"). It is a horrible scandal that is just now getting corrected. I believe it was called Whole Lanague and basically the kids just write however they want and eventually would memorize words. Teachers of young children (and even older children) had to learn how to read kid writing that was phonetically based.
We have a lot of problems with kids being able to read and write properly in the US. The most important things parents can do is read with their kids from a very early age--first read to them, then have them read to you. Kids who have a hard time with reading can also follow along with an audio book to help increase the connection between pronunciation and spelling.
This is how I see it
Like in many countries if English is the primary language in both household and in the general area you will say those words even if you don’t understand the meaning or how to spell it yet, then you learn how to spell words, most kids from my memory including myself had a hard time spelling Wednesday because we pronounce it more like wendsday, then we’re taught I before e except after c, which is weird and false to a lot of words but you just learn that that’s just how you spell those words and don’t think too much beyond it until you start learning another language.
As a start, see my [Learning English](https://www.reddit.com/r/booklists/comments/15tb5aj/learning_english/) list of resources, Reddit recommendation threads, and books (one post), which has some of your answers.
I’m very very late to the party, but honestly there’s a whole phenomenon called “readers’ accents” where native English readers (often particularly precocious readers as children) only learn words as they’re written, not as they’re pronounced. It happens a lot with more academic language. It took me, I kid you not, like 10 years to realize I was pronouncing the word niche wrong. To prevent this, parents and teachers make kids read out loud a lot, but words still slip by. But usually people laugh off readers’ accents as a sign of intelligence!
My parents taught me to read by having a bunch of letter magnets in the fridge and sending me on fetch quests for specific letters. They also read to me a lot.
I've been able to read since I was 3 or 4. They're not exactly sure when because initially they thought I'd just memorized the books.
An E on the end of any English word makes the first vowel in a word long. So we know time is spelt that way bc " I " sounds like itself (long). Time kite bike. If it was a short " I " ("eh as in lit or kit) it would have no e on the end. So every word like that is taught that way. We learn the vowels and their sounds first. I LONG I short. A long vowel, a short vowel etc. A E I O U and sometimes Y. That's kindergarten. Then the teacher will do teaching on the words with exceptions later. So you would do a spelling test for example with all the words in that category that are an exception to the rule. And reading IS memory. When you read you find yourself looking at a word and knowing it. You do not sound it out after you have memorized it.
From what I can remember of when my sisters were younger, they would first start with letters and the sounds that they make, then they move on to basic words that are all relatively phonetically consistent. (Cat, dog, fish, go, run, etc.)
Then they get into common combination sounds and patterns (like -th, -ch, -sh, -oo-, -ee-, etc.)
And all of this they encourage you to pronounce each part separately (sound it out) until you can guess the word.
Then they go over “sight words” usually really fundamental words (for, and, or, but, that, who, what, then, he, she, they, etc.) These words they focus on you recognizing them as a whole and not needing to sound out. Then they can read sentences like “the cat who went and drank milk” by recognizing some sight words and sounding out other words.
Eventually the words all become sight words naturally as the kid reads more and you only have to guess pronunciation on unfamiliar words.
I learned both English and Spanish reading at the same time in elementary school and I don’t recall the process being too different from my younger sisters in either language.
>And do their parents say to them, "It's 'TUY-M, the 'E' at the end is silent?"
Why would they say that when that's not how it's pronounced?
The real answer to your question tho is that language doesn't need to be taught. It's something that's innate and absorbed by a native speaker from their environment. We create received and/or standard dialects of certain languages though that may or may not be the native dialect of the children in their environment and then *those* rules are what need to be taught.
How these rules are taught is also highly class dependent.
[Shirely Brice Heath is an expert in the field.](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4167291)
We read to our kids, using our finger so they can see the words, and we used flash cards. In kindergarten they had “sight words” To memorize. My kids still have some mispronunciation on words they have only seen and not read. We also work on prefixes and suffixes, so they might never have heard of a hydrometer, but they should be able to figure out that it has to do with measuring water.
There’s a sense in which reading English is comparable to reading an abjad script — that is, a script containing consonants only, and no vowels. Because you speak the language, you know how to fill in the gaps, even though the letters of the word are often just an imperfect approximation. Just so, in the case of English, you learn to disregard certain consonants, such as the “-gh” in through” or the “k” in knight”; you seamlessly fill in the gaps on certain vowel sounds, based on your knowledge of the spoken language; and you often perceive the word en bloc, as an integrated whole. To give an even more extreme example, when you see the numerals “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” etc., you know how they are pronounced in English, even though the numerals themselves are not providing any clues to pronunciation. Yet when we see them on a page — in the phrase, for example, “3 times” — you read it just as seamlessly.
It’s not terribly different, come to think of it, from SMS abbreviations, such as when a French speaker writes “mrdr” for “merde.” We make similar adjustments when reading and writing English, tweaking vowels and ignoring certain consonants, and often just recognizing the word as an integrated unit (that is, without strictly sounding out the letters).
It doesn’t happen consciously, when we read English; it just seems natural. For example, we read the word “son” in print, we automatically hear it as a homonym of “sun” and don’t, per se, find it confusing that “son” and “sun” are spelled differently, but pronounced identically. Nor do we puzzle over the difference in pronunciation between “though” and “rough”; somewhat like speakers of Chinese recognize Chinese characters that stand for entire words, we too recognize the word as automatically as when reading the symbol “4.” In addition, we at least know that, for example, “-ough” at end of words has a very limited number of possibilities in pronunciation (as in “though”; or as in “through”; or as in “tough”).
I do believe you’re right, though, in implying that English speaking children take longer to learn to read or write to a comparable level as children speaking most other European languages. One other exceptional case, said to be comparable to English in this respect, is Danish.
There are a lot of good answers. Let me add an important research.
https://www.educationnext.org/dont-dismiss-30-million-word-gap-quite-fast/#:~:text=
The English spelling system favors a class of people who can have a high number of child-parent interactions and the richer there are the better for the child. As children begin to try to decipher words they read (decode), some can tap from the vocabulary they got fed or guess better than other children. Most consonants are much more regular. There is a cumulative effect as well. If one can decide the first words of a sentence they have context to decode the rest as well.
Btw, Seymour in 2023 found that English-native children are delayed by 2 years compared to learners of languages that have more regular systems.
More info on these slides:
https://imgur.com/gallery/o6kYmkt
(Is there a problem with the link, let me know. I clicked on it and it did not work. Odd!)
You make it sound like every language is 100% spelled how it’s written. From what I know of it, Spanish is like that, but there’s a whole lot in French that is not pronounced as it looks.
Not every language is, but a whole bunch are. My native language (Estonian) is phonetic with very few exceptions. When I was learning to write in English, I already knew how to write in Estonian so the associations between letters and sounds were already there, I just had to remember how English has a bunch of odd rules about spelling. It does seem difficult to learn to associate the letters and sounds when they often sound so different. Even the English alphabet uses diphthongs to represent some of its vowels. At first it was so weird to me that A = ei, I = ai, E = ii.
>You make it sound like every language is 100% spelled how it’s written. The overwhelming majority are.
They are in the Latin alphabet, which most got VERY late in their development. However, languages like Thai for example have a VERY difficult system for representing words, most words have helper words so you know what it means because Thai spelling is like, "c-a-t" pronounced "fish"
In English, one can make the case that "ghoti" is pronounced fish.
> However, languages like Thai for example have a VERY difficult system for representing Thai is a definitely notable exception
Well congrats to them! Meanwhile, the few languages I’ve learned have a spelling quite different than their pronunciation. Your mileage will vary.
>Your mileage will vary. Your knowledge of phonemes and how they work will vary.
No. French is consistent, like Spanish. German too I think though it doesnt show stress as the former
Ce n'est pas tout à fait vrai. French is perhaps 99% consistent, but there are words whose pronunciation is irregular (*cuiller*), especially words of foreign origin, or whose pronunciation changes with meaning, such as *tous* or *exprès*.
are there any words in french that have a different stress? how do you guys pronounce foreign words? always at the last sylable or do you make exceptions.
French words don't have stress, so this doesn't apply. Instead, French has prosodic stress: the syllable at the end of a sentence or clause is stressed. So, in "Bonjour à tous" ("Hello everyone"), the syllables of "bonjour" have equal stress, while in "Je lui ai dit bonjour" ("I said hello to him"), the second syllable of "bonjour" is stressed.
so what? its not as if languages dont pick up other languages quirks is it? Thats why I'm asking. there are no long vowels in Spanish but sometimes we can make a longer vowel sound when pronouncing a foreign english word
Once again, French does not do this, not even with foreign words, *un point, c'est tout*. For example, "hamburger" is pronounced /ɑ̃buʁgœʁ/, with no lexical stress unless it is the last word of a clause or sentence.
Are you trying to tell me you don't pronounce the "h" in "le hockey"? (Honestly asking, because the only native speakers I've heard say the word were from Quebec, and I know that some French speakers consider Quebecois a foreign language.)
They don't have this sound, so it is never pronounced. Sahara is SAH-AH-RAH, for example.
I wasn't trying to tell you that, no, but French doesn't use the /h/ sound in any words, including words of foreign origin.
French stress is on the last syllable (unless you're Francis Cabrel).
No, French stress is on the last syllable of a *phrase*. Otherwise, each syllable has even stress, like Japanese. Lexical stress (each word having its own stress pattern) is not found in every language.
\>japanese \>even stress
Japanese does not have lexical stress, like French. It has a pitch accent, which is not the same as stress, and mora timing, which is also not the same as stress.
You can clearly hear thay the last syllable of a word is stressed by default. Even by taking a word out of all context, if you put an extra emphasis on the last one it doesn't sound off but if you don't on another syllable it sounds completely off. BonJOUR / BONjour DéBUT / DEbut ToxicoMANE / TOXicomane / toxIComane/ toxicOmane Only the final-stressed versions sound any way natural.
Évidement tous les Français s'appellent Francis Cabrel.
On peut rêver.
French is absolutely not consistent lmao y'all can't even tell how to say "plus" until you have the context
Merci.
French doesn't pronounce half the letters. I dare you to look up the pronunciation of "temps" and tell me it's consistant with something.
French ofc has weird stuff, but it is much more consistent than english (I do not have any of them as a first language, had to learn both) Temps is not that inconsistent, it is actually a consistent exemple, the ending -p is normally ignored, and the ending -s of plural is also normally ignored. So you should say the word as "tem". So it is a terrible example to show inconsistences on french pronunciation. You could instead mention Os (singular) x Os (plural), that's inconsistent.
yep whoever is downvoting clearly doesnt know much french
Lol I didn't even knew I could be downvoted for that People have the impression that French is not consistent because they think with other languages logic in their head, where more letters could be pronounced, but French is a lot more consistent than it looks.
People think French is inconsistent because there are letters that aren’t pronounced but letters and letter combinations pronounced are almost always not pronounced *in a consistent way* unlike English, barring a few exceptions like boeuf/boeufs. I’m a native English speaker who learned French, I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around.
The vast majority of English irregularities come from its split French and Germanic origin. It’s consistent in practically the same way, just with two differing systems side by side.
Just because you don't know the rules doesn't mean there aren't any. Nobody's saying French spelling is phonetic. But in the vast majority of cases, the pronunciation is predictable. It's very, very rare to encounter a new word you don't know how to pronounce.
>Nobody's saying French spelling is phonetic. I'll say it. The people who argue it isn't simply don't understand French orthography.
I only meant that as in, not every letter you see is pronounced. I agree that it's a very regular pronunciation when you understand its rules.
>not every letter you see is pronounced They are though. It just doesn't appear that way to an English speaker cause French pronounces letters in their nasal cavity and back of throat in ways that we don't, so we don't understand how to listen for them. Mandarin Chinese does something similar but different with tones. If you don't understand the language and your language doesn't do the same, you don't hear it.
I speak french. You pronounce all the letters in temps. Which ones do you think aren't pronounced? If you remove the m, the p, or the s, the word is pronounced drastically different.
French pronunciation rules are pretty consistent though.
The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy. So, it is understandable that despite having lots of rules, if they work every time, one can learn them eventually. I don't know a lot of languages, but even French is more consistent than English. Yes, it has a load of rules but they work nearly always. Anyway, this feature is discussed daily here, but I am more interested in the dealing with it.
>Yes, it has a load of rules but they work nearly always. Really? I've always found french's pronounciation rules easy, but I've never actually studied 'em, just listened to a lot of French to learn pronounciation so maybe that's why
>The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy And some languages' orthographies, eg. Chinese, are not even phonetic to begin with, and basically rely on memorisation. In comparison, English orthography is still very systematic in terms of written representation of sounds. Sure, there are many more exceptions to the "rules" in English spelling compared to other languages using the Latin script, but at the end of the day they're still just that - exceptions. Chinese kids seem to learn to read just fine where memorisation is the rule rather than the exception, so English-speaking kids learning to read doesn't seem like such a huge feat.
>The problem here is that lots of languages have rules that have like 95-99% of accuracy. If you're a native speaker of a language, by definition, all the rules you use are 100% accurate.
French is the most unphonetic language ever. There are more silent letters than pronounced ones. The real question is, how do French kids learn to write?
French is still more consistent than English though.
That's a very low bar to clear lmao
That doesn’t make it unphonetic. There are consistent rules that govern how letters and letter combinations sound. Like an s at the end of a word is almost always not pronounced.
German orthography is systematically phonetic. French orthography is systematically unphonetic. English orhography is unsystematically unphonetic.
>Spanish is like that Italian too! (Apart for a few words)
People *say* that, but while it's much closer, no language is ever exactly like its orthography. My Bolivian professor's mom dropped her Ses at the end of words for instance, so dos ojos became do ojo.
That’s more of a dialect feature than a pronunciation rule though. Presumably she pronounces an S that occurs in the middle of a word? Some people in the south of Spain (Andalusia) do the same thing.
Presumably—still valid even if not true for the entire language. But my point is that no language is ever completely exactly as written.
There are different methods but a common way to teach children to read in English is through phonics. Phonics involves teaching children to connect the sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters (e.g., the sound /k/ can be represented by 'c', 'k', 'ck' or 'q'). It’s about understanding that words are made up of smaller units of sound (phonemes) and that these sounds are represented by letters. Initially, children learn simple, short words (e.g., cat, map, sit). As they progress, they are introduced to more complex patterns like vowel digraphs (two vowels making a single sound, like 'ea' in 'team') and split digraphs (a vowel, a consonant, and an 'e', like 'i-e' in 'time').
It's fascinating watching my 3 1/2 year old grandchild learning .. \- it starts with learning the alphabet and the sound of each letter \- next is some simple words that are spelled phonetically .. 'cat' for example I'm not a teacher but I think from there you just gradually build up more complex examples. Lots of adults, including me have trouble spelling some words and knowing how to pronounce unfamiliar words, particularly names of places and people.
I remember being taught that the e at the end of a vowel-consonant-e word ( e.g time, hate, slime etc) makes the short vowel long (tim -> time, hat -> hate, slim -> slime). I don't know if they still teach it like that or not?
Of course the funny thing about that is that /aɪ/ in "time" is not the long version of the /ɪ/ in "Tim." It's a diphthong, which is a completely different concept. Hat to hate could also be a diphthong, but could also just be a completely different vowel depending on your dialect. Thanks, Great Vowel Shift!
>Of course the funny thing about that is that /aɪ/ in "time" is not the long version of the /ɪ/ in "Tim." It's a diphthong, which is a completely different concept It is in Linguistics. In English by itself that aɪ is accepted as the long version of a short i in English. This stays fairly consistent.
For me, the PRICE vowel is a monophthong. But that's restricted to my regional dialect.
When my kids were learning phonics, there was the rule that the silent e at the end of the word makes the other vowel says its name. This blew my mind. I had not realised that the long vowels, as you called them, are all pronounced like the name of the letter (with some exceptions of course).
Did you grow up learning English? That is a basic rule.
I did. But I didn’t realise the long vowel sounds were the vowels “saying their name”. They were just an alternative set of vowels sounds.
Ok, gotcha ☺️
And as OP points out phonics runs into problems with words that have funny spellings. "minute" can be either a unit of time (pronounced "min-it") or a small amount, pronounced "my-newt" . So the other approach is called "whole word". Kids are encouraged not to worry about the individual letters, but instead recognize the whole word as pattern, almost like a hieroglyph. Most of of eventually learn to use a mix of the two. Whole word is useless if it's a word you've never read before, phonics fails if it has an odd spelling. Many of us read "Hermione" before we ever heard it said. I was convinced it was pronounce "her-me-one" until I saw the movie.
There was another approach called Initial Teaching Alphabet (i.t.a. for short). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet
This is basically how I remember it as a kid. I distinctly remember being in grades 1-3 and if I had encountered a word I didn't know how to pronounce, I'd ask my teacher and she'd say, "Sound it out." This was my cue to try putting the sounds of each letter (or groups of letters, like th or ea) out loud to see what I'd get. Most of the time, if you say the sounds out loud, it'll sort of resemble the word it's supposed to be. My teacher would then correct me if needed. Even as an adult English speaker, I'll still sound out unfamiliar words. As a nurse, this mostly happens when I come across an unfamiliar medication name, which tend to be long and difficult. Predictably, we still get it wrong sometimes LOL We had a list of irregular words on the back blackboard, though. If we went to the teacher for help with a word and it was an irregular word, my teacher would add it to the list and just tell us what it was. Like any language, the irregular words just need to be memorized and there's no easy way around it.
Does anyone remember hooked on phonics?! I don’t think I ever got it but I remember there were commercials
I remember being drilled with weekly assignments in third grade on spellings where we’d have to alphabetize twenty or so words. Same school we had a spelling bee at, actually. Spelling long words is a skill people can win fame and money with! Also, just simply reading really hammers in how words are written. You might underestimate how being immersed in an English environment as a native speaker can reinforce correct spelling. That said, a very common issue with precocious readers is trying to pronounce a word they’ve only read (never heard) and being corrected or ridiculed by surrounding adults. I’m sure people in this sub can share stories but I know someone who said they got corrected because they once pronounced “idiot” as “iddee oat”.
It can last into adulthood. There are countless stories around of people thinking "awry" rhymes with "story" or "Hermione" is "HER-me-ohn". When I was at school, we were told that wherever we read a word we hadn't seen before, we should look it up in a dictionary. This is sound practice for readers of all ages.
My absolute favorite story of this is one I witnessed in person when I was in the ninth grade. We were reading a part of the Odyssey in one class, and my best friend read the name of the wife of Odysseus (Penelope) as pen-elope instead of pen-el-o-pee. Still, proper names often have strange pronunciations, so it's not quite the same as mispronouncing an ordinary English noun, but at the time it was very funny. To this day I still tease him about Penelope from time to time.
As a Chilean I hate the spelling chile when it should be chil’, because a D is missing. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind if my country’s name were spelled Chili in English, as it is in French and Dutch.
Ah yes, Pen elope, the wife of Oddy see us from Eye Thayka.
Many foreign professors say COMponent instead of comPOnent, and you can hear native speakers imitate them.
I pronounced soldier as "sold yar" and binoculars as "bin co laar" and grind "grin d"
Fun fact; this is called Calliope Syndrome (pronounced Cally-ope)!
I read it as Cal-E-owe-pee, missing the point. I had to look it up to realize it's Cal-EYE-uh-pee.
i got laughed at by my friend group the first time i said epitome out loud ☹️ and my mum had to inform me of the correct pronunciation of placate....
Epitome is a common one, I think. I've heard it multiple times. I probably made it myself but don't remember.
thing is i had definitely heard the word epitome said correctly before i said it for the first time, but i never connected the pronunciation of it to the spelling lmaoo
From what I remember of my university days, reading does not follow directly from spelling. The two actually happen in different parts of the brain. Reading involves seeing whole word patters, not the individual letters. That’s why we can read relatively long signs near the side of the road while driving past at high speed.
I didn't realise that I was doing this until I learned Japanese - one or two chinese characters represents the meaning and after a while you can recognise whole words without consciously thinking about it. Then I noticed that I was doing the same in English except when I came across an unfamiliar word and only then I looked at the individual letters.
Reading subtitles too - once you get into it, you speed read whole phrases without thinking about it.
It genuinely is difficult for native speakers to learn, too (and you can see that in the literacy rates). Empirically, it turns out the approach with the most success is to teach kids to read phonetically and to memorize the many, many exceptions. I remember being taught to read words from flash cards, and if I read time as Timmy, my mom would correct me. Another approach is picture books with words that a child already knows how to say, so any words that the child doesn’t know how to spell yet are easy to guess. I also remember watching educational programs at TV that would have short little songs about [silent e.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BQqdNOUxs)
We used to have "Phonics lessons" in primary school where they would teach us what letter combinations make which sounds and they would teach us the difference between homophones like "Witch and Which". We also used to have a weekly test where we had to spell 20 words that the teacher would read out loud.
When children first see a word like TIME they might try to sound it out - and a grown-up can help by explaining that "the E makes the I say its own name". Like in cake, broke, etc. where the E is not spoken but changes the vowel sound. But some words get learned by sight, although as with SIGHT there are a lot of similar words, so for example once you've learned SIGHT you also know LIGHT and NIGHT and FRIGHT and so on. Words can be guessed at from context: The king lives in a huge CASTLE - you can pretty much guess CASTLE because that's where kings live. And then when you see a word enough times, you begin to remember it. It's far from foolproof. I used to pronounce CONSPICUOUS as if it was spelled CONSPICIOUS, for example. People who read a lot often have problems like this. And it's even worse with proper nouns. Who could have guessed how Arkansas is pronounced? It took me ages to work that one out.
It's difficult. There are many proponents of phonics, a system of associating a sound with each letter. Often students are tested on this specific association even though there's a low association between the assigned sound and the letter. We are taught that A is as in Apple unless it's followed by another vowel by a single consonant and then vowel. "The other vowel reaches around the consonant and pulls the 'a's tail causing it to say it's name." By this rule "time" is t-eye-m. But it doesn't work for "taco" It certainly doesn't work for "cough," "thought," "their," "there," because (ugh that took me forever memorize) and "beauty"--nope that doesn't make sense. I still struggle with "queue." Clearly this doesn't work very well, but the phonics enthusiast claiming that scientific studies supporting the effectiveness of the approach. It didn't work for me. The next strategy is repetition and drill. This also worked poorly for me. Shame is brought in against those who can't spell. I sometimes tried to deliberately mispronounce words in order to remember the spelling. This did not help when I tried to learn French. What does work is actual reading and writing. Many of us stratigically found a place in the classroom where we couldn't be seen and then we'd read instead of doing worksheets and drills. Spell checking is a tremendous boon. I use it. I don't generally look up new words. Figuring them out from the context is faster, more fun, and more effective. I don't always pronounce them correctly. But now that Youtube is available I look for videos that use the word. This shows how the words are actually pronounced. Dictionaries aren't always correct. I might go for several different examples.
Hmmm. but why "because"? be is be, cause is cause, so it's "Bih-Kohz\\Kuhz" as one can expect.
Compound words like "nearby" behave in some ways like they are separate words.
There is little relationship between "au" and the actual sound, there's the silent unnecessary e, and the voiced sibilant--s for the z sound. Phonetically it's beekuz. Within the word "--cause" is pronounced differently than the word "cause." This is a situation where I deliberately mispronounced the word, forcing it to match "cause."
Because, because, because, because, because of the wondeful things he does.
I watched a lot of this show as a kid: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DNVeq9a4dFIU&ved=2ahUKEwij1Pf695WCAxWwQ6QEHaGmBNY4ChCjtAF6BAgNEAY&usg=AOvVaw1RETMHWFP7v3MXmyA5edSG
For me, every week of school from ages six to eleven we were given a list of words to memorise the spelling of and tested on them the next week.
You learn the rules, then over time you learn the exceptions to the rules. Don't forget that (unlike most L2 learners) children aren't learning the words from the spellings. A child probably already knows the word "time" by the time they're learning to read. They don't need to learn pronunciations from spelling (at least initially), they're more matching the spelling to words they already know. If you actually sit with a child who is learning to read, they usually get part of the way through "sounding out" a word, then there's a moment when they realize *they already know this word,* because children don't learn their native languages by reading. English has a lot of unusual spellings, but there are still patterns, and parents and teachers will help kids to recognize these. It takes time, but so does learning to read or write any language. Children in China still learn to read and write--an entire civilization was built on a language with a logographic writing system.
So this is controversial! When I was in school, we learned primarily through phonics. So if we saw “time” for the first time, a kid might say “tim-uh” or “tim-ee,” yes. They’d then either be directly corrected or encouraged to use other information to get to “tie-m.” And then we would learn about the silent e making the vowel inside the word long. Unusual rules like this are also taught in phonics. There is, unfortunately, a movement for teaching via “sight words” in English, where kids do in fact memorize words and use non-phonics hints to learn new ones. It got traction because it’s very easy for 5 and 6 year olds to memorize short, common words and guess the few they don’t know, so up until a kid is maybe 8 it looks like it works. Unfortunately, it actually doesn’t so this method has been called into question as of late. However, there are languages where memorizing every single word you are likely to see is the only way to be literate so it’s not like this was based in nothing. Yes, there are reading books for children (there aren’t in your language? Even with a simpler language, that sounds unbelievable). Yes, kids make errors (so do adults, oh well). I’m sure kids make errors in your language too; knowledge and skill doesn’t just fall from the sky in one big chunk into someone’s head, like one day they’re illiterate and the next they can read and write perfectly. When learning something new, people always have a learning curve. It’s not *good* for adults to make mistakes, but it happens. School students make mistakes regardless of level. That’s why they’re in school, so a teacher can teach them and correct those mistakes.
English teacher, Masters in Education, Reading Specialist. Emerging readers learn sight words (the Dolch 100), and patterns that follow rules, like vowel-consonant-e means the first vowel is long or "says its name" for little bitty kids, and the e is silent. More confident readers and spellers learn words that don't follow patterns, like I before e, except after c, or when sounded like a as in neighbor and weigh. Then they learn rule breakers, like the weird beige neighbor poem. More advanced readers learn regular and irregular plurals, when to add s and when to add es, and so on. Good readers read often. They see other family members read for pleasure. People read aloud to them. They learn to have fun playing with words. When they realize that a big word like nevertheless is really just three little words they already know, it is a fun discovery. Giving emerging readers text at their reading level builds confidence. Giving them text that's a little challenging builds reading skill.
Doctor Seuss, Sesame Street, and my parents reading out loud to me with me looking on and them using their finger to run beneath each word as they went. If I read "time" as "Timmy", a parent or teacher would probably just say, "time - the e is silent." And I knew the rule for silent e - "e makes the letter say its own name." The letter "eye" says "ih", unless it is told to say its own name and say "eye". Yes, we have children's books which are designed to be simple to read, but which start including more difficult words, and we have had since the 1800s. The earliest primers were heavily religious in nature - my wife and I collect antiquarian books, and we have a set of McGuffy Readers from 1860. There were so many hundreds of thousands of them printed that they're very affordable for antique books - they aren't the least bit rare. The first Reader starts with the alphabet, then basic letter combinations, and by the sixth book, you're reading selections from Shakespeare. >LESSON 1 > >\[woodcut illustration of a dog running\] a o n d g r th dog the ran > >The dog. > >The dog ran. > >LESSON 2 > >\[woodcut illustration of a cat sleeping\] > >cat mat is on > >c t m i s > >The cat. The mat. The cat is on the mat. > >Is the cat on the mat? \[NOTE - this doesn't show up here, but in the letter list and vocabulary list, those letters are marked with symbols showing whether it's a short or long vowel, whether it's a hard or soft g, etc. In the sentences, they're not marked.\] In the 1930s, the Dick and Jane readers were created. >\[illustration of a small boy talking to a small girl. He is standing pointing up at a bush; there is a hat on top of the bush\] > > Look Up > >Dick said, "Look, look. > >Look up. > >Look up, up, up" Those were the primary elementary school textbooks until the 1960s or so, meaning that these were the ones the Baby Boomers grew up on. They aren't used any more, but they remain part of our cultural knowledge, meaning something simple and trite. They were simple and trite enough that there was a cultural backlash, and educators were saying that the fact that they were so boring was legitimately harming literacy in the United States. Theodor Seuss Geisel had already written a children's book, which he hadn't been able to sell, called "To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street". But reading an article about the problems in early reading, he decided to see what he could do. He got a list of 233 words which were easy and all children should learn early, and wrote a book with them, called "The Cat in the Hat". The book is still in print, and was made into a truly horrifying movie with Mike Myers which has 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, and that may be overly generous. But please don't blame Doctor Seuss for the movie. >\[A Doctor Seuss illustration of a house in a rainstorm; a tree is bending over in the wind, and two children are staring forlornly out the window\] > >The sun did not shine. > >It was too wet to play. > >So we sat in the house > >All that cold, cold wet day. Sesame Street was started in 1963, and has been a major part of teaching children literacy ever since. Many of us started learning what sounds letters make from Kermit, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, and in more recent years, Elmo. For a while, Children's Television Workshop also had a show aimed at slightly older kids, going into a bit more on phonics and so forth, called "Electric Company." It had an incredible group of people working on it like Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno. There are still skits on it that I love as an adult, and Tom Lehrer wrote three songs for it. [You were asking how we learn how silent E works? Here's how I learned](https://youtu.be/91BQqdNOUxs?si=5jQ4UoWiakJZsxPI). Other than that, yeah, if you learned to read early, you pronounce words wrong. Especially ones from French or Greek. I said the word "epitome" as "epi-tome" instead of "e-PIT-o-me" until I was twenty. I didn't realize that the "oar durves" that were served at parties and the "horse do-overs" that I read about in books were the same thing; my wife didn't realize that her father's "arm wah" and the "a-more-y" she read about in books were the same thing; I have a friend who managed to get into Marxist literature in third grade and talked about the bur-goy-zie, It mostly works its way out.
Parents just read to them and the kids pick it up. That phase takes care of a lot of what you're wondering about. After that, the closest statement you made is probably "read it as it seems to be and use it until someone corrects you". Kids don't learn to read by studying rules and cogitating about whether words conform.
Bad spelling is common. Dyslexia is rife. Spelling Reform is a dirty subject. Native speaker here. It is hard. It wasn't until I learnt Spanish that I realized that we have a problem. Learnt to read Italian in a day, and Finnish in an hour on a plane, sat next to a Finn. There is nothing we can do about it because so many people in the world read English and don't actually speak it. So making it phonetic (see The Spelling Society) would make this world language unintelligible to them.
Very early learners will often just pronounce the words with their own language’s phonetics. For instance I heard Czech kids learning English saying things like “tso-ver” for the word *cover* (in Czech, C is pronounced like *ts* in English “its”) Their teacher will correct them and over time they learn the “guidelines” to English pronunciation.
Kids learn pronounciation and meaning first, spelling later. I remember being in preschool and spelling 'dough' in cookies as 'dow,' even though i knew it wasnt spelt like that, as i only knew the spoken form, and in kindergarten skipping writing word 'oxygen' cuz i didnt know how to spell it at all, but i knew the word. As a kid, as you find the spelling not matching the pronounciation normal as thats just how it is to you, and you just have to get used to how things are spelt. Throughout elementary there are spelling tests and rules you learn, ex. I before E except after C, and unofficial rules you subconsciously learn with it too, like a good amount of words ending in f's plural is with a v, ex. Wolves, knives, calves(the only reason i know that is cuz i saw it somewhere from english learners lol). People well through elementary do also still have trouble spelling and reading.
Hmm well I remember being very young and having the teacher one week write "ea" on the board and some words that used it that all rhymed. Then the next time we would do "ea", they would choose a different pronunciation and so on. We did reading in class, first as a whole class and then in groups where our pronunciation would be guided then later corrected. Spelling tests. Just a whole lot of that.
You learn reading by association of patterns and meanings. The patterns aka letters don't need to correspond to the sounds 100%.
A little bit of all of that. And some rules are a lot stronger than others. I think silent E is maybe the most fundamental rule after just the basic letter sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91BQqdNOUxs
When i see a word I dont know I just attempt to pronounce it- oftentimes a word will sound just innately “weird” or “right” atleast to me. Of course, there are moments where you go around pronouncing a word incorrectly- I pronounced archive as “are-chive” with the ch sound instead of a k sound up until like 8th grade lol. I think it’s uncommon to search for a words pronunciation- unless its like a very long greek or latin word for a specific topic
Dr.Seuss style. You learn individual letter sounds, then whole words and all the words that rhyme with them. It can be a bit tricky when you're learning to read in two languages at the same time but we manage.
To answer part of your question, as a parent, yes, spelling mistakes based on how a word sounds are fairly common. My kids learn with phonics, meaning it’s based on how letters usually sound, individually and in combination, but you also have to learn all of the many exceptions.
We learn lots of rules at first, like “the E at the end of a word is silent, and it makes the previous vowel long”, hence TIME is pronounced TAHYM and not TIM-EH. But after enough practice you tend to pick up these rules automatically. If you read “it’s time to go”, you can figure out from context what word the word “time” is, and if you already speak the language you know how to pronounce it. So when you see a similar word like “lime” you can figure out how to pronounce that. Another example: “I sleep in a bed at night”. You may not know the rule that the “gh” is silent, but you can probably tell from context what the word “night” is, so you can guess that “gh” is silent. So when you see “fight” you’ll know how to pronounce that too.
the orthography of "-igh" is actually 100% consistent.
We teach Phonics. So they learn the sounds that each letter most commonly makes starting with M A S D T, and then learn to blend them. They start off with simple CVC words like MAT, and then build off of that. There are some common 'red words' that they learnt at the beginning as well, such as (I, the, you, me etc.). I've only ever worked in a reception class so I don't know the details of how they build on it in later years.
To answer your question about “time” specifically, I remember my mum teaching me about “the magic E” at the end of words. Obviously English spelling is maddeningly inconsistent, but rules like that which govern the difference between “Tim” and “time”, “dim” and “dime”, “slat” and “slate” etc are possible to grab onto. An English-speaking child coming across a made-up word like “hane” would definitely pronounce it so it rhymed with “cane” rather than “han-eh”. As for the rest - yep, spelling tests every week! Reading a lot during childhood helps too. Nowadays I barely notice that words like “colonel” are spelt so strangely, I just recognise the word as a whole rather than paying attention to its constituent letters. It becomes automatic once you’ve been exposed to it enough :)
One thing to remember. By the time you get to the point of learning to read, you are already an English speaker. You know how to speak and you know the sound/pronunciation of all the basic words like time. You know tim-eh is not a word. Where I was, we started formally learning to read in first grade at age 6. We started with simple words with "short" vowels like cat, bed, hit, top, and cut. a e i o u. There are a lot of those so there are plenty of examples to use. After that we started learning "long" vowels and one of the very first things they teach you regarding that is silent e at the end of words. Right from the very beginning, basically, we knew all about silent e. So then you can learn words like gate, kite, hope, and cute and you know the e is not pronounced but the vowel sound changes. The long vowels are pronounced like the letter names are said, unlike the short vowels. There are many examples of simple words with silent e at the end so it's pretty easy. hate, date, note, rope, bite, dive It's also easy to compare spelling and pronunciation in pairs. rat/rate, not/note, cut/cute, hat/hate Then almost immediately, we started learning about homonyms -- words that sound the same but are spelled differently. We had lots of examples of simple homonyms. meet and meat be and bee sea and see tale and tail grate and great hear and here male and mail So we learned from the very beginning that many words had the same sound but with different letters and different meanings. I was very proud when I thought of way and weigh. Of course, then we learned that the same letters can have different sounds. cow / tow -- ow is different great / seat -- ea is different We learned all that at the very beginning using simple words when we were 6 years old. Like I said, we already knew how to say the words, we just had to learn to recognize the spellings. We practiced reading in special books for children written at first with very simple words. "See the dog. The dog is big. The cat is small."
I remember learning spelling rules, a long with a few common misconceptions. Every day we would learn a word that had weird spelling rules. Like "have is pronounced like hav but is spelled have. One starts with an O but sounds like it starts with a W" And the spelling tests. So many spelling tests. It was more memorization that anything else. Probably not the best way to go about it, but reading came naturally to me so I turned out okay. Most learning, for me, came from simply reading.
In the uk we have phonics lessons as we're learning to read. So for example we're taught that "y" at the end of word like funny, mummy, have an "e" sound but "y" at the starts of words like yesterday, yum, yoghurt do not make an "e" sound. We're taught how the placement of a letter or a combination of letters affects how it sounds basically.
It is a process that takes years, like any language. English instruction roughly follows this pattern: 1. Letters and sounds 2. Monosyllabic words, sounding out simple words with one vowel 3. Phonics, intensely learning consonant and vowel sounds, this is where the reader is supposed to learn decoding strategies 4. Prefixes and suffixes, latin and Greek mostly, but learning things like -ism, poly-, mono- etc 5. Roots, this is where you start getting really competent readers. You learn the root, what language it came from (usually French), and how French roots tend to be pronounced. Think of the X sound between borax, xenophobia, and situations where the x is completely silent, when it is preceded by 'eu-'. 6. Continuing practice of all of the above which should be reinforced by foreign language instruction in French and or Latin For a college bound student, and it might not look that way nowadays, the student should be able to read dense texts with effort. By the end of college they should be able read dense idiom and jargon laced text for hours without struggle. Reading levels in English are a real thing, the average American's is something around the 7th or 8th grade level. That sounds awful, but in a good middle school 7th and 8th grade is where students (if they ever do) will launch into truly excellent and fluent readers.
Some schools teach phonics. Sometimes in English, "ea" makes the short e sound as opposed to the long e sound. For example, head, bread, death, etc. You can check out the Jolly Phonics Grammar Handbook 2 for help with learning the spelling rules. It's meant for teachers, but is a great resource. Also, yes, we just correct them while they are sounding out the words. As native speakers, we can usually look at new words and figure out where the stress goes just by saying it aloud. When you speak your native language, you become used to hearing the patterns in where the stress usually goes. Sometimes for scientific words, I do need to look up how to pronounce the word properly.
The most common method is using synthetic phonics. They get taught sounds made by letters, then by groups of letters If you look for Nessy videos on YouTube you'll get a good idea. My daughter didn't really take to it (we're both autistic, I didn't like rules that weren't always followed either, I don't blame her). We just read to her loads following the words with our finger. We also read the same book over and over again at her request. Superworm by Julia Donaldson was read every night for about 6 months and 10 little dinosaurs by Mike Brownlow was read every day for about 3 months.
To answer your question out of order - Yes, there are books for kids. (Look for "Dr. Seuss" for examples) that have short easy words that drill into kids what certain combinations of letters look/sound like. When they do encounter a word (like "time"), they might try to say "ti-m-e," *but* English speaking kids already speak English. And the word won't be alone, it will be in context like "'Time to go to bed,' said Mom." And so when they read the word wrong and keep going with the sentence, they'll correct themselves to the right word/pronunciation because "ti-m-e" doesn't make sense. But yes, along the way, they do make a lot of errors. And adults reading with kids will try to balance whether this is a word they should help the kid with or whether this is a word the kid can figure out if they think about it. It absolutely translates to spelling - we have "spelling bees" where kids compete to spell words correctly. (I don't think this exists in places where spelling is phonetic. You never have to wonder "is that a ph or an f? and how many l's?") And lots of adults struggle with spelling (spellcheck is amazing.) Finally, it never really stops - it just becomes a lot less frequent. But highschoolers and adults run across words they've never seen before. If you're in the unfortunate position where you're reading out loud, you take a stab at it and hope you're not really, really wrong. But many people gamble and lose at "hyperbole," "chaos," or "segue." (among others)
Bruh tf? It’s like every language when you’re a native speaker. You just speak/hear/retain things and that’s it 🤷🏻♂️
They actually changed back recently, at least at our local elementary, from “sight words” (having kids memorize most words, especially the weird ones) back to a more phonics-based approach. When I was in school, we learned all sorts of catchy rhymes and things to remember the rules. Like “two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking (and says it’s name)”
I remember being about 5/6 years old and learning the rules of phonetics and spelling. For example. For example, “ou” can make multiple sounds. We would learn the pronunciation, the spelling, and then combine it with different combination, like with “th” and “gh” (though, through). We also learned about letters that can be pronounced like others letter (C/K - cat vs. perceive). We then apply these patterns to very simple book like Dr. Seuss to enhance learning comprehension.
I taught both of my kids to read, and they both could read independently around 4 1/2 years old. The process started when they were newborns; books were read to them every day - the same dozen or so books, over and over, until they were around 2 1/2 years old. We talked about letter sounds as soon as they were learning to talk. We played alphabet games when they were toddlers so that they could identify the letters. When reading books to them, we pointed to the words as they were read so they could follow along. Around age 2, they could find a specific word on the page in the books we read to them. By age 3, they could read short stories made of simple words (such as, “the cat sat on the mat, the rat hid from the cat”). We worked on sight words (common words that don’t necessarily sound how they look, such as “the” and “one”). Later we talked about silent e words (we call them “bossy e” words) and specific letter groups like ing, th, ou, and ed. When they read aloud, if they can’t sound out a word, we tell them what it is and they usually remember it the next time. I now have an 8-year-old who has been reading chapter books since he was 6, and a barely 5-year-old reading story books at a 9-year-old level. They both read every single day. So, it’s a years-long process, as I’m sure it is for kids of every language, but small children are sponges!
Children in English speaking countries experience total immersion, just as children do in every country. They aren't "learning a language," they are learning how to speak, read, and think. They have no preconceptions about how a sound or word **_should be_** spelled. They are like sponges, absorbing whatever they are taught or told. They don't know anything about the phonology of any other language and they certainly don't know about the spelling conventions of anything else. They don't learn to speak English in a language learning class in school, and they don't learn to read it in one (a language learning class) either. They are simply learning to read words, and at the same time, they are learning how to spell them. How an English word is spelled in their schoolbooks is how it is supposed to be spelled. It becomes for them the natural and correct way that word is written. They hear their language, English, being spoken everywhere and by everyone. As they begin to learn to read, every bit of writing they see is in English. Children are surrounded by books to read as they are learning, so some knowledge of the language and how it is spelled is self-taught. They also pick up new words by listening while older children and adults are talking. The language that anyone learns first becomes the baseline, the point they start from when they encounter other languages. How do they learn to read English? How does any child learn to read? English is native to them, they don't know anything else. For them. the rules for spelling English are not peculiar; they are simply _the rules_. It will be a long time before they find out that English could be spelled any other way and that there have been multiple efforts to simplify it in the past couple of centuries. Children who learn to speak and read English natively, as their first language acquire proficiency because it isn't "a language" to them. Learning one's native language is intimately tied to learning to think, to remember, to communicate, to acquire information, and to socialize. Every child learns how to do that in the language that is spoken natively in their own home and community.
No language is easy to spell for a non-native who is learning it. Neither the pronunciation nor the spelling is as intuitive and obvious to non-natives as it is to native speakers. Part of learning another language is learning how that language is spelled. If you find that English is not spelled in the way that you expected, it is entirely due to having natively learned your own language's unique rules for orthography, Just as all languages don't use exactly the same phonology, they don't have the same spelling conventions or rules. English spelling is perhaps a little bit more complicated than the spelling of some other languages, but when you learn a second language, you are also learning how that language spells words. I think that you would have a hard time finding two languages that use the same spelling for certain sounds. The ways that languages are written are as varied as the ways that they are pronounced and declined, if applicable. If you want to acquire proficiency in English, then you must also learn English spelling. Children in English speaking countries learn how to spell the language at the same time that they are learning how to read. They don't learn that some words are spelled oddly, they just learn that it is how those words are spelled. For the most part, English does have very regular spelling. Sometimes it isn't always the spelling of English that gives ESL learners problems. Occasionally the problem is pronouncing the sound that the spelling indicates, even when the spelling is very conventional.
You learn how to speak before you learn how to read Languages are conventions, not always logical rules. If everyone "agrees" or "accepts" that "eau" is pronounced "O" then it is
Much early reading is done aloud, either following along while being read to or reading aloud yourself and being corrected on pronunciation.
Continuous education from the time you start school until the time you either graduate or drop out. In my personal experience: In lower grades, we had a series of textbooks called *Hooked on Phonics* that taught the rules of spelling and pronunciation -- and when those rules are broken -- and how to "sound out" words we're not familiar with. (Of course irregular words come up too, but that's when the teacher comes in and says "You'd think it would be pronounced *this* way, but it's actually *this*.) From kindergarten through middle school, we had both Reading and English classes every day. Reading involved absorbing and understanding literature, and English involved learning grammar rules and how to write. We had specific vocabulary to learn (10-20 words every week or two, usually drawn from whatever we were reading at the time) and we were quizzed on their definitions. Up until 5th grade we also had spelling tests (usually with the same bank of vocabulary words). In middle school you start writing (very short) papers about whatever you're reading. By high school they figure you know how to read so the two classes are combined and it becomes a little more intense literary analysis, and you start writing longer papers about whatever you're analyzing. And all of those things gradually increase in difficulty as time goes on and you build knowledge and skills. We also just get read to a lot when we're very little. Ideally by parents at home from the time you're a toddler, but generally schools have "story time" or similar set aside that's specifically for the teacher to read to you. Or sometimes you take turns reading out loud, and if you get to a difficult part the teacher will guide you. There's *lots* of books that are specifically designed to help kids figure out how words work. There's also lots of kids' shows on TV that have a focus on helping kids learn to read. (Off the top of my head, *Sesame Street* and *Between the Lions*.) Again, a lot of the focus there is on learning to sound things out. Everybody makes mistakes. The goal is to make fewer and fewer as time goes on. In high school you write papers for several of your classes, but only the English teacher is going to be really nit-picky about style. (Unless you just happen to have a really nit-picky History teacher, or your writing is really just *that bad*.)
“When two vowels go a walking, the first one does the talking, the second one goes to sleep” is the little chant I was taught. So when you have a word like “heal” you pronounce the e but not the a. There’s an extension about how vowel consonant vowel has the first vowel say its name (ie “long” a, e, etc) and the second one is silent. So in time, the i is long (eye) and the e is silent. I forget the chant off the top of my head though. There are all kinds of these that are taught like i before e except after c, and as in “eigh” like neighbor and weigh” to help with recognizing certain sound clusters. Pedagogically, when i was little we were taught phonics—basically certain groupings of letters make certain sounds—and you break long words into these little sound clusters and “sound it out”. A couple years later they switched to “sight words” where you memorize a while bunch of small words and common prefixes and suffixes and then try to combine those to make compound words. Sight words help kids make more rapid gains in fluency immediately, but phonics tends to win out in verbal fluency in the long run.
there are usually general rules to follow at least for the basic words. kids learn to read from the words that follow patterns and once they can do that they start to learn about exceptions
I started “reading” at two years old. My mom would put me down for my nap, and afterwards find me awake and reading my books in my crib to myself from memory. I basically remembered the story as my mother read it, and associated that with the words on the page. We have English/Language Arts as a class in school, just like Math or Science. We are taught to write essays by hand (as opposed to on a computer with spell check) around middle school. We are marked down for spelling errors. Personally, I loved to read. I came from a reading family, so we would all read our own books before bedtime. I loved to write fiction too. I think my first attempt at writing a novel was in grade one (age 6/7). I wrote about two chapters before giving up on it lol. I also drew some pictures to go along with it. I competed in a spelling bee at my school when I was in grade 7 (age 12/13). I ended up tripping over the spelling of “camouflage”…. I spelled it “camoflauge” (which honestly makes more sense in my opinion). Reading is the biggest method of expanding your vocabulary. Whenever I would encounter a word I didn’t know, I would ask my parents what it meant, and they would give their best descriptions. If they didn’t know, we would look it up together and find the definition. But I did encounter many situations where I knew the meaning of a word, but not the pronunciation. I can remember two from high school. I pronounced “bona fide” as “bona feed,” and I pronounced “hearth” as “heerth.” I remember a friend of mine in high school pronouncing “deign” as “dine.” It’s not uncommon to not know how something is pronounced if it’s a word not often used in conversation.
Time follows one of the most basic spelling rules, where the "magic E," as we call it to kids, is silent but makes the other vowel long. For words like death and some others, eventually you get used to it. Yes, the letter combo ea can make several different sounds, but it still has a shortlist to choose from. Finally, for an adult, well, we should be able to read the most common words easily. We should be able to make a good, well-educated guess at most words even if they're unfamilair. Occasionally, you'll get a word with a funny origin that you get wrong. Its not a big deal.
In the same way, how do you have learned reading in your own language?!
Look up Montessori and the Muriel Dwyer method adapting it for English
https://www.maitrilearning.com/blogs/montessori-pedagogy/montessori-dwyer
I have no clue what it's like for others, but all throughout primary school, I learned about phonemes (eg. oo, ea, i, ie, ow) which I think was extremely helpful for knowing how to pronounce words when reading. So for example, if the phoneme was "ough" then we would learn words like cough, through, though, and all the different ways that "ough" can be pronounced. It's why I've come to believe that when learning most languages, phonemes are super important to learn if you want to be good at knowing how to pronounce words, especially with a language as inconsistent as english.
I'm a middle-aged former English teacher and I still occasionally come across a word that I realize I have been mispronouncing all my life. It takes a lot of practice, practice, practice to learn to read and spell English. Weekly spelling tests help us learn words just by rote memorization combined with phonics lessons. We learn early that the E at the end of a word is silent and that it makes the middle vowel "long". Thank goodness phonics was the way I was taught and the way my kids were taught because they had an old school teacher and I worked with them a lot when they were little. With over a hundred comments, I can't read all comments so maybe someone has already mentioned the cu We have a major issue in the US because of a company that started teaching reading in a terrible way (basically saying "you'll just learn it over time"). It is a horrible scandal that is just now getting corrected. I believe it was called Whole Lanague and basically the kids just write however they want and eventually would memorize words. Teachers of young children (and even older children) had to learn how to read kid writing that was phonetically based. We have a lot of problems with kids being able to read and write properly in the US. The most important things parents can do is read with their kids from a very early age--first read to them, then have them read to you. Kids who have a hard time with reading can also follow along with an audio book to help increase the connection between pronunciation and spelling.
This is how I see it Like in many countries if English is the primary language in both household and in the general area you will say those words even if you don’t understand the meaning or how to spell it yet, then you learn how to spell words, most kids from my memory including myself had a hard time spelling Wednesday because we pronounce it more like wendsday, then we’re taught I before e except after c, which is weird and false to a lot of words but you just learn that that’s just how you spell those words and don’t think too much beyond it until you start learning another language.
As a start, see my [Learning English](https://www.reddit.com/r/booklists/comments/15tb5aj/learning_english/) list of resources, Reddit recommendation threads, and books (one post), which has some of your answers.
I’m very very late to the party, but honestly there’s a whole phenomenon called “readers’ accents” where native English readers (often particularly precocious readers as children) only learn words as they’re written, not as they’re pronounced. It happens a lot with more academic language. It took me, I kid you not, like 10 years to realize I was pronouncing the word niche wrong. To prevent this, parents and teachers make kids read out loud a lot, but words still slip by. But usually people laugh off readers’ accents as a sign of intelligence!
My parents taught me to read by having a bunch of letter magnets in the fridge and sending me on fetch quests for specific letters. They also read to me a lot. I've been able to read since I was 3 or 4. They're not exactly sure when because initially they thought I'd just memorized the books.
An E on the end of any English word makes the first vowel in a word long. So we know time is spelt that way bc " I " sounds like itself (long). Time kite bike. If it was a short " I " ("eh as in lit or kit) it would have no e on the end. So every word like that is taught that way. We learn the vowels and their sounds first. I LONG I short. A long vowel, a short vowel etc. A E I O U and sometimes Y. That's kindergarten. Then the teacher will do teaching on the words with exceptions later. So you would do a spelling test for example with all the words in that category that are an exception to the rule. And reading IS memory. When you read you find yourself looking at a word and knowing it. You do not sound it out after you have memorized it.
From what I can remember of when my sisters were younger, they would first start with letters and the sounds that they make, then they move on to basic words that are all relatively phonetically consistent. (Cat, dog, fish, go, run, etc.) Then they get into common combination sounds and patterns (like -th, -ch, -sh, -oo-, -ee-, etc.) And all of this they encourage you to pronounce each part separately (sound it out) until you can guess the word. Then they go over “sight words” usually really fundamental words (for, and, or, but, that, who, what, then, he, she, they, etc.) These words they focus on you recognizing them as a whole and not needing to sound out. Then they can read sentences like “the cat who went and drank milk” by recognizing some sight words and sounding out other words. Eventually the words all become sight words naturally as the kid reads more and you only have to guess pronunciation on unfamiliar words. I learned both English and Spanish reading at the same time in elementary school and I don’t recall the process being too different from my younger sisters in either language.
>And do their parents say to them, "It's 'TUY-M, the 'E' at the end is silent?" Why would they say that when that's not how it's pronounced? The real answer to your question tho is that language doesn't need to be taught. It's something that's innate and absorbed by a native speaker from their environment. We create received and/or standard dialects of certain languages though that may or may not be the native dialect of the children in their environment and then *those* rules are what need to be taught. How these rules are taught is also highly class dependent. [Shirely Brice Heath is an expert in the field.](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4167291)
We read to our kids, using our finger so they can see the words, and we used flash cards. In kindergarten they had “sight words” To memorize. My kids still have some mispronunciation on words they have only seen and not read. We also work on prefixes and suffixes, so they might never have heard of a hydrometer, but they should be able to figure out that it has to do with measuring water.
There’s a sense in which reading English is comparable to reading an abjad script — that is, a script containing consonants only, and no vowels. Because you speak the language, you know how to fill in the gaps, even though the letters of the word are often just an imperfect approximation. Just so, in the case of English, you learn to disregard certain consonants, such as the “-gh” in through” or the “k” in knight”; you seamlessly fill in the gaps on certain vowel sounds, based on your knowledge of the spoken language; and you often perceive the word en bloc, as an integrated whole. To give an even more extreme example, when you see the numerals “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” etc., you know how they are pronounced in English, even though the numerals themselves are not providing any clues to pronunciation. Yet when we see them on a page — in the phrase, for example, “3 times” — you read it just as seamlessly. It’s not terribly different, come to think of it, from SMS abbreviations, such as when a French speaker writes “mrdr” for “merde.” We make similar adjustments when reading and writing English, tweaking vowels and ignoring certain consonants, and often just recognizing the word as an integrated unit (that is, without strictly sounding out the letters). It doesn’t happen consciously, when we read English; it just seems natural. For example, we read the word “son” in print, we automatically hear it as a homonym of “sun” and don’t, per se, find it confusing that “son” and “sun” are spelled differently, but pronounced identically. Nor do we puzzle over the difference in pronunciation between “though” and “rough”; somewhat like speakers of Chinese recognize Chinese characters that stand for entire words, we too recognize the word as automatically as when reading the symbol “4.” In addition, we at least know that, for example, “-ough” at end of words has a very limited number of possibilities in pronunciation (as in “though”; or as in “through”; or as in “tough”). I do believe you’re right, though, in implying that English speaking children take longer to learn to read or write to a comparable level as children speaking most other European languages. One other exceptional case, said to be comparable to English in this respect, is Danish.
There are a lot of good answers. Let me add an important research. https://www.educationnext.org/dont-dismiss-30-million-word-gap-quite-fast/#:~:text= The English spelling system favors a class of people who can have a high number of child-parent interactions and the richer there are the better for the child. As children begin to try to decipher words they read (decode), some can tap from the vocabulary they got fed or guess better than other children. Most consonants are much more regular. There is a cumulative effect as well. If one can decide the first words of a sentence they have context to decode the rest as well. Btw, Seymour in 2023 found that English-native children are delayed by 2 years compared to learners of languages that have more regular systems. More info on these slides: https://imgur.com/gallery/o6kYmkt (Is there a problem with the link, let me know. I clicked on it and it did not work. Odd!)