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I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though

I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former? And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"? Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics? I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?

cjohnson318 4y ago
From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is" a lot.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French? “Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Of course but that's not GP's point I think. A kid shall wonder why it's not at the very least "oiso" (when there's one) or "oisos" (when there are several). Or even why not "waso" (with "wa" as in "wapiti"). And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw): https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Well the discussion is about phonics, so I was thinking of how none of the letters in "oiseaux" are pronounced. That was pointed out to me by a French colleague. Although he stopped at "oiseau", strangely. Anyway I thought it was a common joke of sorts. I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word. Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.
xattt 4y ago
You can imagine each language as a painters’ pallete. Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all. Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”. To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home. If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary. This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.
javajosh 4y ago
So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation, of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us we can create our own notations and methods to translate between the old and new, but then you get splitting and fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such a notation, and make something beautiful with it, well, then you have a chance at fixing something. 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them. 2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused? 3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation? Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  > Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation? While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature. Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them. Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.
taeric 4y ago
This really isn't that difficult, all told. Just consider the rules of any sport, and see how conditional so many of those are. Yet they will pick them up just fine. Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong. Acknowledge the difference and move on. For the specific examples you are using, the general idea is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often defined by the rest of the word. Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the history of the word." Even better if you can have time to go into the history some and explore it. Because that can be what gets kids interested. Exploring. (And this is no different than many other things. Why do you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of those. Path dependence is a thing.)
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> Just consider the rules of any sport, and see how conditional so many of those are. Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P
hydrok9 4y ago
History! Britain got conquered a bunch of times and some of the old words have just stuck around.
- mcv 4y ago
  My son, not a native English speaker, even taught himself the Chaos poem. It's a good way to learn to appreciate the horrors of the English language.
  - hydrok9 4y ago
    They are living relics of the ancient past! and we still use them today! English is cool.
dmm 4y ago
> Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics? Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you learn the deviations. Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it works pretty well as a starting point. English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized, fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for memorization so it works ok. Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling. "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on spelling. But they just spent two years practicing incorrect spelling!
generalizations 4y ago
Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a combination of several older languages, saxon and french included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which language the word construction originated in. English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Multimodal - Germanic languages, French, Latin, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Slavic languages have all produced common words in the English lexicon.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  "tough", "rough", "though" and "borough" all come from Old English, without any French influence. The wackiness in pronouncing "ough" is sadly not predictable from any set of rules and as you'd probably expect varies between dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
  - hydrok9 4y ago
    "at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English, and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them."
analog31 4y ago
I think we started with books that happened to have words that were easy to decode. After that point, we admitted that the English language is actually quite a mess. And once the kids got some momentum, then they began figuring things out for themselves, or asking. We continued reading to them, and would occasionally stop to ask them if they knew a particular word. To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language. And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.
sudobash1 4y ago
That is just the tip of the iceberg for "ough". The way I pronounce English there are six sounds that "ough" can make: 1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow) And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate this with Britain and some northeast American regions. There are probably other sounds too. As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when encountering it in a word, try them until one seems correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the floor."
gladiatr72 4y ago
Because then you would have a baked-in dialectic that no system can explain. Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.

cjohnson318 4y ago

From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is" a lot.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French? “Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...

TacticalCoder 4y ago
Of course but that's not GP's point I think. A kid shall wonder why it's not at the very least "oiso" (when there's one) or "oisos" (when there are several). Or even why not "waso" (with "wa" as in "wapiti"). And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw): https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Well the discussion is about phonics, so I was thinking of how none of the letters in "oiseaux" are pronounced. That was pointed out to me by a French colleague. Although he stopped at "oiseau", strangely. Anyway I thought it was a common joke of sorts. I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word. Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.

xattt 4y ago

You can imagine each language as a painters’ pallete. Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all. Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”. To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home. If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary. This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.

javajosh 4y ago

So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation, of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us we can create our own notations and methods to translate between the old and new, but then you get splitting and fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such a notation, and make something beautiful with it, well, then you have a chance at fixing something. 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them. 2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused? 3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation? Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.

ajmurmann 4y ago
> Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation? While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature. Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them. Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.

taeric 4y ago

This really isn't that difficult, all told. Just consider the rules of any sport, and see how conditional so many of those are. Yet they will pick them up just fine. Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong. Acknowledge the difference and move on. For the specific examples you are using, the general idea is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often defined by the rest of the word. Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the history of the word." Even better if you can have time to go into the history some and explore it. Because that can be what gets kids interested. Exploring. (And this is no different than many other things. Why do you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of those. Path dependence is a thing.)

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> Just consider the rules of any sport, and see how conditional so many of those are. Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P

hydrok9 4y ago

History! Britain got conquered a bunch of times and some of the old words have just stuck around.

mcv 4y ago
My son, not a native English speaker, even taught himself the Chaos poem. It's a good way to learn to appreciate the horrors of the English language.
- hydrok9 4y ago
  They are living relics of the ancient past! and we still use them today! English is cool.

dmm 4y ago

> Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics? Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you learn the deviations. Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it works pretty well as a starting point. English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized, fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for memorization so it works ok. Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling. "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on spelling. But they just spent two years practicing incorrect spelling!

generalizations 4y ago

Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a combination of several older languages, saxon and french included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which language the word construction originated in. English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Multimodal - Germanic languages, French, Latin, Greek and (to a lesser extent) Slavic languages have all produced common words in the English lexicon.
tomjakubowski 4y ago
"tough", "rough", "though" and "borough" all come from Old English, without any French influence. The wackiness in pronouncing "ough" is sadly not predictable from any set of rules and as you'd probably expect varies between dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)
- hydrok9 4y ago
  "at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English, and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them."

analog31 4y ago

I think we started with books that happened to have words that were easy to decode. After that point, we admitted that the English language is actually quite a mess. And once the kids got some momentum, then they began figuring things out for themselves, or asking. We continued reading to them, and would occasionally stop to ask them if they knew a particular word. To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language. And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.

sudobash1 4y ago

That is just the tip of the iceberg for "ough". The way I pronounce English there are six sounds that "ough" can make: 1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow) And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate this with Britain and some northeast American regions. There are probably other sounds too. As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when encountering it in a word, try them until one seems correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the floor."

gladiatr72 4y ago

Because then you would have a baked-in dialectic that no system can explain. Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.