Learning to Read

My daughter is 5 years old. She’s in kindergarten, and she’s learning to read. A few months ago, she couldn’t read at all. But now, she knows the sounds of all the letters of the alphabet, as well as all hiragana. What’s that? It’s the main writing script for Japanese.

You see, my daughter also goes to a Japanese school, though not for much longer. She’s able to read both English and Japanese. Actually, she can read Japanese faster. It’s easier to learn to read Japanese than English. You might not think so, since English has 26 letters, while Japanese has 46 hiragana, 46 katakana, and thousands of kanji. It’s hiragana that she knows, and this is what’s needed to be able to read basic Japanese.

But why is it easier for her to read Japanese? Hiragana is phonetic. With a couple exceptions, everything sounds exactly as it’s written. English is a mess. There’s a meme going around:

If GH stands for P as in Hiccough
If OUGH stands for O as in Dough
If PHTH stands for T as in Phthisis
If EIGH stands for A as in Neighbour
If TTE stands for T as in Gazette
If EAU stands for O as in Plateau

Then the right way to spell POTATO should be: GHOUGHPHTHEIGHTTEEAU

I have no idea what the original source is, but this is everywhere. But you get the point, right? English spelling is stupid. I taught English for 11 years, but I managed to get children, including a 5 year old, to be able to read English reasonably well.

My point here is that if you can read English with no trouble at all, you’re doing pretty good. It must have one of the least strict rules for spelling.

I’m pretty good at spelling. When I was in grade 7, I tested at a university level for spelling. But there was one word that I had no idea how to read: paradigm. When I saw it, I thought, “paradiggum?” I knew the actual pronunciation. I’d heard the word before, but I’d never seen it spelled out. And then there’s “embarrassed.” How many r’s is it? Well, it’s two.  Don’t forget that!

What are some words you had trouble spelling or were pronouncing completely wrong?

My Daughter’s Writing

My daughter likes typing on computers. She just types random letters and numbers. She has a lot of fun doing it. But one day, she did something unusual.

Take look at this:

After typing on the computer, she decided she was going to write down everything she typed. She had typed “xezsoocewctfyeft” then wrote it down. Not bad for someone learning the alphabet.

Languages Are Getting More Challenging

I’ve done mainly Romance and Germanic languages on Duolingo, and have started a Celtic, Turkic, and Slavic language. But they all have one thing in common: they all use the Roman alphabet.

My next two languages are Ukrainian and Russian. They both use the Cyrillic alphabet, which I can’t read much of at all. Before I even attempt the languages on Duolingo, I need to do two things: learn Cyrillic and learn how to type with the Ukrainian and Russian keyboards. After that, I can try the languages.

There is one more language available to study, and that’s Catalan. However, it’s for Spanish speakers, which means I need to improve my Spanish so I can study Catalan.

But there are more languages coming soon. In fact, it looks like Welsh, another Celtic language, will be available next week. And soon after that, we should be seeing Vietnamese fairly quickly. Others coming in later this year may be Swahili, Hungarian, Greek, and Romanian. Other languages that look to be further away are Hebrew, Czech, Hindi, and Indonesian. I’ve been hearing that Korean is about to start being developed.

In a Reddit Q&A, Duolingo’s founder suggests that there will be about five endangered languages being added each year starting this year. That sounds quite interesting.

So, anyone know Cyrillic? Any tips?

A to Z, a Blog Challenge

I’ve decided to join the Blogging from A to Z challenge in April.  I have yet to decide on a theme for it, but I’ll wait and see what their theme is going to be.

The challenge has more than 900 people so far, with me being number 930.  I’m sure there will be far more than that.  I’ll keep my posts pretty short, but I’m thinking that I may write short flash fiction of around 100 words for this challenge.  It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

In celebration, watch this video.