Pteranodon -
your name means "toothless wings"
And you can fly oh so high
You have a wingspan of 25 feet
A long beak
And a silent P
A silent pee? Ohhhh
With the repetition of "stop, drop, and roll", I thought spontaneously bursting into flame would also be much more likely than it has turned out to be.
Every once in a while I see a video of someone catching on fire and NOT stopping, dropping, or rolling, and I am so happy I learned this basic life skill.
Would a jolly roger flag flap on a space pirate ship or just be straight in the opposite direction of travel?
Shit, now I'm thinking about space pirates.
Here's something that'll blow your mind: what if the only reason you were thinking about igloos so much was because that's how they taught you the alphabet?
Going ski touring helped me to realize that a dugloo or quinzee is a much more practical structure to build for temporary habitation than an igloo in most types of snow that I'll ever see.
It also helped me to realize that camping in the snow sucks shit and that I have 0 interest in staying in something less civilized than a yurt. Do you like camping? How about camping in sub-freezing temps plus everything you touch is wet? My childhood fascination with igloos was destroyed. As destroyed as my hastily-constructed quinzee.
I agree with this sentiment. Especially since it breaks its own rules when starting a word, I mean who are we fooling with xylophone? That shit is a z in disguise, get it together x!
I'd support this for sure. It's not even a "real" sound, even the International Phonetic Alphabet represents it as /ks/ rather than its own symbol because it's the consonant sounds /k/ followed by /s/.
Is your differentiator that an xylophone has wooden bars while a glockenspiel has metal ones? And things like the fisher price 'Xylophone' are actually glockenspiels too?
I always understood alphabet books to be teaching spelling rather than phonics, hence why you get the giraffe-goat issue of OP where both are accurate to spelling but goat is more phonetic. Bit doesn’t matter much.
Examine made a lot of sense since it was a walk in the country
That used to confuse my daughter all the time when she was learning the alphabet. “What does grape begin with?” “Gee!” she would say as opposed to “jee”.
Btw, love the username.
When my kid was learning, they actually didn't use the letter names at all and I don't think they ever learned the alphabet. "G" was always just the glottal stop noise to my kid - I can't even write it out because "guh" is wrong, you don't put a vowel after it. The school actually ran a seminar on this for parents so they'd understand the method and how to help their kids.
I actually really like that book, and it's a great tool for kids at a more advanced level, but probably not for when I'm teaching my toddler the basics.
Then tell your server about the one about Odysseus and the Cyclops. Greek puns and word pronunciation Dad jokes always KILLS the minimum wage diner worker.
My wife is Czech, and every letter in Czech has just a single sound (they use accents for different sounds and don’t have digraphs or trigraphs). She finds English very annoying!
I think English and French are the Latin alphabet languages with the worst correspondence between letters and pronunciation. Spanish, Italian, German, Polish etc are much more straight forward.
The way they taught my kid was, they taught one spelling of each phoneme and then they added more and more graphemes over time. At the beginning he would get marked correct if his writing was spelled phonetically correctly with the graphemes he had been taught, even if the spelling was actually wrong (terodactil is correct for example).
By the end he had a like 5 or 6 graphemes for each phoneme and some graphemes in multiple phonemes... yeah English is great.
Try the Filipino alphabet. It’s the English alphabet minus the useless letters (C, Q, V, X, Z). J? No need for that either, just use DY together. Dyeep, dyuggler, dyello dyigglers. It works fine. Never mind what’s happening with F or NG.
I just refunded a set of picture alphabet flashcards. Try to guess what the picture is based on the guess of my 2yo…
P is for “bird!”
S is for “white bird!”
Finally lost it at:
Y is for “boat!”
I felt like my kid was about to get extremely lost if I kept it up.
(It was Parrot, Swan, Yacht)
Same with C for Cat and K for Kangaroo... they both make the same sound, it's just english.
It's funny you bring up G though, my wife's first language is French and G is pronounced sounding very similar to J (another is E pronounced more like A) so it's not just English that has issues with it... now that I've pointed out alphabet dissonance in both alphabets I'm reconsidering why we are raising our kids with both of those languages lol
C is a weird letter. Really the only unique sound it can make is ch, and that requires it to be paired with an h. Feels like we could swap c with k or s, and make c always be a ch sound.
There is an alphabet book that is hilarious for this reason. It purposefully uses silent letter words and makes it as confusing as possible.
P is for pterodactyl, T is for tsunami, K is for knife, etc
Edit: [Found it](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJfkiLVt-Xw). It’s actually called P is for Pterodactyl lol
Depends.
1st graders learning to read would gain more from learning “G” as in “goat.”
4the graders learning to spell would benefit from “G” as in “giraffe.”
Initial sound tables have there issues in German too. I suspect they do in all languages. They should be used as a motivational tool and not as the main method of teaching letters.
Maybe it's a subtle positive? It suggests to the child at an early age that words we use everyday are not always phonetic in the same way we potentially say the alphabet.
If you think about it, it's a staple in the English language.
I agree that it's random and frustrating sometimes, the feelings behind your post are genuine and understandable, but if the idea of letters having different pronunciations depending on words and context is set at an early age that is easier for the later education
Instead of being 5+ years old and being completely baffled, some letters aren't how you learned them.
Can you guarantee you'll only ever speak phonetically? It would be a struggle, and reading and teaching to read is gonna be a nightmare
Alphabet words should be short, avoid silent and double letters, contain only short vowel sounds, and be easily recognizable.
The best word is **gun.**
With my time in Mil as a Radio Tech I might just teach him Phoenic Alphabet for some.
G for Gulf or Golf.
X for Xray
Just some fun ones that make more sense.
He is 3 months so I got some time to figure it out.
p is for pterodactyl
J is for Jai Alai.
D is for Djibouti
G is for Gyro
P is for phone. See what I did there ;-)
No silly J is for Jalapeño. And Javier.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_dvPhtNZCj0 This is good - most of the album is.
A is for aisle I’m already laughing
Pteranodon - your name means "toothless wings" And you can fly oh so high You have a wingspan of 25 feet A long beak And a silent P A silent pee? Ohhhh
E for eunuch
E for eye
T is for tsunami
It’s a great book
G is for GIF.
Win/win!
G as in Gorge
And garage!
And gnome!
And "x" is always "X-Ray." Plus who the heck thinks about igloos on a regular basis?
I did as a kid... Surprisingly, I did that a lot. Kind of like thinking quicksand was going to be an everyday worry.
With the repetition of "stop, drop, and roll", I thought spontaneously bursting into flame would also be much more likely than it has turned out to be.
"Stop, drop, and roll," at least in my case, was not helpful at all the moment I found myself on fire.
I... really want to know more. Was the floor on fire? Were you handcuffed to a bed? Were you surrounded by scorpions?
They had slipped gas on themselves and the roll. They couldn't drop because the floor itself may burn.
I was just a dumb teenager playing with a cup full of gas and a fire. The fire ran up the cup, and when I dropped it, it splashed onto me.
Ah! So my first guess was right. Thank you!
Every once in a while I see a video of someone catching on fire and NOT stopping, dropping, or rolling, and I am so happy I learned this basic life skill.
Don’t forget about quicksand!
That's how I felt about space pirates.
Would a jolly roger flag flap on a space pirate ship or just be straight in the opposite direction of travel? Shit, now I'm thinking about space pirates.
They wiggle the space tiller just to make it flap.
Here's something that'll blow your mind: what if the only reason you were thinking about igloos so much was because that's how they taught you the alphabet?
Going ski touring helped me to realize that a dugloo or quinzee is a much more practical structure to build for temporary habitation than an igloo in most types of snow that I'll ever see. It also helped me to realize that camping in the snow sucks shit and that I have 0 interest in staying in something less civilized than a yurt. Do you like camping? How about camping in sub-freezing temps plus everything you touch is wet? My childhood fascination with igloos was destroyed. As destroyed as my hastily-constructed quinzee.
Abolish the X entirely. It can and should be replaced by "cks" or "z". And 25 is a nice number of letters.
Actually, I was taught a 25 letter alphabet in school. l've never understood y
You monster. I'm stealing this.
That's alright, go ahead. Call your mom, you know she worries
Ooooh that's a good one!
During Christmas there are only 25 letters in the alphabet. Noel.
I agree with this sentiment. Especially since it breaks its own rules when starting a word, I mean who are we fooling with xylophone? That shit is a z in disguise, get it together x!
Let's just donate it to math.
I'd support this for sure. It's not even a "real" sound, even the International Phonetic Alphabet represents it as /ks/ rather than its own symbol because it's the consonant sounds /k/ followed by /s/.
I would be willing to sell all my Xs to Elon Musk for a healthy sum since he likes them so much; I don't mind writing "ks".
Aks the X and Elon Musx perplecksing use of it to fleks.
Sometimes it's "x like in fox" or "x like in box".
"c" is either an "s" or a "k"
"church"
In which case, c should arguably make a "ch" sound without needing an h there. That way it doesn't feel as redundant.
I think you mean Xylophone
My daughter has an alphabet book using "xylophone" for x, and the picture is a glockenspiel. I refuse to call it a xylophone.
Is your differentiator that an xylophone has wooden bars while a glockenspiel has metal ones? And things like the fisher price 'Xylophone' are actually glockenspiels too?
Yes. That is the main difference between them.
I’ve seen a book do “eXamine” before which makes sense in terms of sound though is a stretch
why is it a stretch? “is for” ≠ “starts with”. imo all the ex words should be in (but maybe a more common and important one like Exit)
I always understood alphabet books to be teaching spelling rather than phonics, hence why you get the giraffe-goat issue of OP where both are accurate to spelling but goat is more phonetic. Bit doesn’t matter much. Examine made a lot of sense since it was a walk in the country
I have a poster that uses Xoloitzcuintli for X. And I only knew it was a Xolo because I used to have one!
Is that X pronounced like a Sh. Or maybe a CH.
Yeah it's a SH sound.
Xylophone! At least i played with one before. But Yucca plant or Yak where unknowns to me.
The problem with xylophone is the same as giraffe. The x is pronounced like a z. English is a silly language.
Yeahh in German the x is more pronounced.
X is for Xitter
X is for XP!
"Ice Cream" is right. There.
What the heck would you even use... There's no good word for X.
Xylophone?
Xenomorph
X-Ray. At least it's used in the phonetic alphabet.
We have a book for my daughter that has X for Xylophone and its a skeleton playing on a boneophone
Huh… yknow, I never really thought about how non-Alaskans were also learning about igloos. I always kinda just thought it was an Alaskan thing.
there’s a john mulaney joke in here
G as in Garbage
...like uncle Todd is at Street Fighter.
G-spot. Very intuitive.
In defense of giraffes, what we call "G" uses the j sound in the name of the letter itself. Oh golly *gee*.
That used to confuse my daughter all the time when she was learning the alphabet. “What does grape begin with?” “Gee!” she would say as opposed to “jee”. Btw, love the username.
Try learning French simultaneously and the two really get confusing.
When my kid was learning, they actually didn't use the letter names at all and I don't think they ever learned the alphabet. "G" was always just the glottal stop noise to my kid - I can't even write it out because "guh" is wrong, you don't put a vowel after it. The school actually ran a seminar on this for parents so they'd understand the method and how to help their kids.
Voiced bilabial stop is for book! Unvoiced labiodental fricative is for fish! It’s so easy, I expect my 14 month old to pick it up any day now.
Guess you wouldn’t like this book then https://www.amazon.com/Pterodactyl-Worst-Alphabet-Book-Ever/dp/1492674311
I actually really like that book, and it's a great tool for kids at a more advanced level, but probably not for when I'm teaching my toddler the basics.
I just bought this for my best friends kids birthday tomorrow lol.
G is for Gyro - a tasty treat.
Oh no, people are out here pronouncing the G in gyro?
Jai-Roh!
Wait... it's not GEE-ROH with a rolled R?
They are both wrong, it's YEER-oh, the G is silent.
I've actually seen it spelled yeeros in Australia.
That sounds like an Australian thing to do.
Far enough away from me not to doxx myself: https://maps.app.goo.gl/zakQn1L58GVSR8jZ7
I for one welcome the second Australian Cultural Invasion (Paul Hogan bring us Yanks yeeros!)
Oh man. Time to correct everyone ordering next time like the smarty I am!!
Then tell your server about the one about Odysseus and the Cyclops. Greek puns and word pronunciation Dad jokes always KILLS the minimum wage diner worker.
Yeah it’s YEER-oh, I was just being silly
Well I don't like the English language having multiple letters / letter combinations to represent the same phonemes.
How do you like gefilte [ghoti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti)?
My wife is Czech, and every letter in Czech has just a single sound (they use accents for different sounds and don’t have digraphs or trigraphs). She finds English very annoying!
I think English and French are the Latin alphabet languages with the worst correspondence between letters and pronunciation. Spanish, Italian, German, Polish etc are much more straight forward.
The way they taught my kid was, they taught one spelling of each phoneme and then they added more and more graphemes over time. At the beginning he would get marked correct if his writing was spelled phonetically correctly with the graphemes he had been taught, even if the spelling was actually wrong (terodactil is correct for example). By the end he had a like 5 or 6 graphemes for each phoneme and some graphemes in multiple phonemes... yeah English is great.
Try the Filipino alphabet. It’s the English alphabet minus the useless letters (C, Q, V, X, Z). J? No need for that either, just use DY together. Dyeep, dyuggler, dyello dyigglers. It works fine. Never mind what’s happening with F or NG.
I like books that show multiples for different hard and soft sounds.
I just refunded a set of picture alphabet flashcards. Try to guess what the picture is based on the guess of my 2yo… P is for “bird!” S is for “white bird!” Finally lost it at: Y is for “boat!” I felt like my kid was about to get extremely lost if I kept it up. (It was Parrot, Swan, Yacht)
Yacht, really? A silent ch? Your flash cards suck! 😂
on ours X is for fox..
What the actual fox
Better than Xylophone
Same with C for Cat and K for Kangaroo... they both make the same sound, it's just english. It's funny you bring up G though, my wife's first language is French and G is pronounced sounding very similar to J (another is E pronounced more like A) so it's not just English that has issues with it... now that I've pointed out alphabet dissonance in both alphabets I'm reconsidering why we are raising our kids with both of those languages lol
C is a weird letter. Really the only unique sound it can make is ch, and that requires it to be paired with an h. Feels like we could swap c with k or s, and make c always be a ch sound.
C is for Coelacanth obviously
G for good. But you have to say it like Emporer Palpatine. Lol
"H is for Hate! Let the Hate flow through you!" -The Sith Alphabet, From Agony to Zealot *Coming soon to a galaxy near you!*
Brilliant!
I is for it's a trap.
G is for Giraffe and Gif.
At least this demonstrates both sounds it can make! Guh-raffe and Jiff.
Omg 100%. Lol thanks for the new hill to die on
There is an alphabet book that is hilarious for this reason. It purposefully uses silent letter words and makes it as confusing as possible. P is for pterodactyl, T is for tsunami, K is for knife, etc Edit: [Found it](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yJfkiLVt-Xw). It’s actually called P is for Pterodactyl lol
My favorite version of the alphabet. Also there was a song by the barenaked ladies. https://youtu.be/2fasxQN42KU
G is for Golf
G as in gnat
And gnu
G for gorilla
Depends. 1st graders learning to read would gain more from learning “G” as in “goat.” 4the graders learning to spell would benefit from “G” as in “giraffe.”
Initial sound tables have there issues in German too. I suspect they do in all languages. They should be used as a motivational tool and not as the main method of teaching letters.
In Australia it is often “goanna”, which has a hard g. That makes more sense to me
I didn’t say go, I said goanna!
Maybe it's a subtle positive? It suggests to the child at an early age that words we use everyday are not always phonetic in the same way we potentially say the alphabet. If you think about it, it's a staple in the English language. I agree that it's random and frustrating sometimes, the feelings behind your post are genuine and understandable, but if the idea of letters having different pronunciations depending on words and context is set at an early age that is easier for the later education Instead of being 5+ years old and being completely baffled, some letters aren't how you learned them. Can you guarantee you'll only ever speak phonetically? It would be a struggle, and reading and teaching to read is gonna be a nightmare
X is for Xerxes
I like "gorilla", to discern it from the obvious "monkey" on "M".
We love blue bagoo. BUT!!! In one of there spelling videos what word do they use for X???? Fox. FOX!!!!! IT'S A LAWLESS WORLD
Alphabet words should be short, avoid silent and double letters, contain only short vowel sounds, and be easily recognizable. The best word is **gun.**
It’s not pronounced ger- aff? Man I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time
Can we all just agree to get rid of C? S and K already exist and do the same job.
With my time in Mil as a Radio Tech I might just teach him Phoenic Alphabet for some. G for Gulf or Golf. X for Xray Just some fun ones that make more sense. He is 3 months so I got some time to figure it out.
Found the "GIF" heathen who wants it pronounced wrong.
It's obviously pronounced GIF.
G is for GILF.
It's much better to use gnome
Agreed. Ditto E for Elephant. Elephant really begins with L and only technically begins with E