Do you agree..?

Question

Kindly tell me ..What do you mean when you say ....?

1. People who speak English as their first language are not necessarily aware which sound for A they are using when they use or read a word they have known. Of course, they are literate, whether they can explain the phonics system or not, because literate means capable of reading.

2. Quite simply all those irregular verbs - it's like we don't have a standard verb . It's most definitely the biggest stumbling block to learning good English.

Answer 1

1. I once knew a first grade teacher who told her students that the A sound in "ball" was the same as the A sound in "apple."

Here in Korea, I did my dangdest to teach another foreign English teacher how to say the sound of each letter without adding a vowel.

2. Even the regular verbs are hard enough. I spend countless hours trying to teach my students which verbs end with the S sound in the third person singular (paints, skips), which end with the Z sound (goes, comes), and which end with an extra syllable (boxes, dozes).

Answer 2

Unlike most other languages English doesn't have a set phonetic pronunciation for every word. If you have ever seen the musical "My Fair Lady" or read the Book "Pygmalion" then you could easily see this concept.

Then there are things like phrasal verbs (which, I'll call a kind of slang for argument's sake). Phrasal verbs are those verb phrases that we know so well and use so often that most often consist of some basic verb plus a preposition or adverb that then changes the meaning of the verb. Take for example, the verb to MAKE. Then add some prepositions/adverbs to it:
to make OUT (= to kiss and smoosh faces with someone passionately) to make UP (=to do at a later time, as with a test; to get back on good terms with someone you might have been fighting with) to make OVER (=to complete redo, as with getting a whole new wardrobe, look, etc.)
See what I mean? :P These phrasal verbs are some of the hardest things for non-native English speaking to learn, and to be able to use correctly.


Spellings in english is hard...because so many words have extra letters that you don't need...like through...psycology.The fact that the spelling is far from phonetic - the same combinations of letters can stand for totally different words, like the "ough" in "tough", "though", "drought", etc.


Its pronunciation, and all the words that sound the same but arent, like see and sea, wander and wonder. it makes it hard to follow ppl sometimes, especially when accents are involved.
In most words that end in "e", the vowel is
long (says it's name) bake, take, fate, smite, home, phone.
The idioms are insanely difficult for others to understand. ("Rains cats and dogs," "see the light," etc.)
Because these languages are phonetic not English.Phonetic here means that you can predict the pronunciation from the spelling, and predict the spelling from the pronunciation ...


English is not as simple as it appears to be become it is a complicated admixture of several European languages, such as- Greek, Latin, French, German, English etc. Thus it possesses approximately 1000 000 words.
There is no doubt about it - English is objectively much harder than Spanish, particularly because of the way it "overworks" its core vocabulary. Look at common verbs like "to take" and "to put" - they can assume a huge number of different meanings. Learning these "phrasal verbs" is a nightmare for all foreign students of English.

One might also say it's the complex verb system, though - it seems obvious to native speakers, of course, but for non-native speakers it takes a long time to figure out which tense to use when, and many never quite master it.
Its pronunciation, and all the words that sound the same but arent, like see and sea, wander and wonder. it makes it hard to follow ppl sometimes, especially when accents are involved.

There is no doubt about it - English is objectively much harder than Spanish, particularly because of the way it "overworks" its core vocabulary. Look at common verbs like "to take" and "to put" - they can assume a huge number of different meanings. Learning these "phrasal verbs" is a nightmare for all foreign students of English.





English was "screwed up" long before the modern generation got its grubby paws on it, and jargon and slang have been injected into it for centuries. And in truth, English (and most other languages) has never been exact enough for truly good technical use. Its conjunctions do not reflect any sort of consistent logic system, such as Boolean logic. And its nouns are fuzzy in definition at best. Often times, such as in Law, a special set of rules and definitions must be created for a language to be used in a technical manner, and this set of rules and definitions doesn't always (or even usually) completely line up with the accepted or common definition or use of the word, which creates confusion (and allows politicians to play the public, and allows laws to be redefined without any sort of action by a legislative body).