5 ms·
For what it's worth, although English is based on a small alphabet, we read whole words at a time (rather than one letter at a time). So although we are bewilde
by jl6 12y ago
For what it's worth, although English is based on a small alphabet, we read whole words at a time (rather than one letter at a time). So although we are bewildered by the idea of learning thousands of characters, we exercise similar skill in recognising tens of thousands (out of a total of millions) of English words.
- satuon 12y agoAlso English is not that phonological. In reality, you need to learn how combinations of 3-4 letters are mapped to sound. It's more like syllabary, really, except you don't have a separate glyph for each syllable.
- davidgerard 12y agoEnglish has middling-simple grammar [+] and you really can make a good start with a few hundred words. But learning those first few hundred words ... about half of them have such completely ridiculous spelling, you might as well be learning pictograms anyway. (I'd like you to picture trying to explain this to a confused four-year-old. Her spelling's good now, a few years later ...) [+] no genders, no inflection, not many cases. Of course, articles are just ridiculous, and I challenge any English speaker to explain to a native Russian speaker the rules for when and when not to use "a" and "the" without looking it up ...
- leeoniya 12y agoi'm native russian and english, Russian rules and exceptions are even more ridiculous and have all the [+]