3 ms·
Is it objectively at the top, or is that more an easy thing people love to assume is truly difficult? I don't think we have any evidence that kids are slower t
by taeric 3y ago
Is it objectively at the top, or is that more an easy thing people love to assume is truly difficult? I don't think we have any evidence that kids are slower to learn in any particular language, do we? (Oddly, we do have evidence that moving away from a primarily phonics based teaching method was a terrible idea, but I haven't seen much to compare with other languages at the same ages.)
- andrewflnr 3y agoObjectively, probably not, but I'm only asking about perception, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
- taeric 3y agoFair. I'm more than a little worried on the perceptions, though. Having arguments with people who think that the English alphabet is not phonetic really hurt my views there.
- andrewflnr 3y agoIt's very much only approximately phonetic. This is painfully obvious when you compare with a language like Spanish that has very few exceptions to the 1-1 letter-sound mapping (and even those are fairly consistent). And yes, I did learn to read with phonics. But for the real difficulty learning English, consider all the forms of "be" and the weird rules for which one to use. (Spanish is only dubiously better in this respect; there are still a lot of verb forms you just have to memorize, but at least you can follow actual rules on which form to use.)
- taeric 3y agoIt is phonetic, period. It is not 1:1 symbol to sound, but it is all sounds. Hence phonetic. This is in contrast to logographic symbol sets, that do not correspond to sound encodings. Think emoji. Advanced grammar is a trap in all languages.