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Wouldn'be better phonetict.....

Wouldn'be better phonetict.....

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@cosmic-energy4 said
Why English language have to have spelling and not use phonetics,the children have to spend hrs.in learnig to spell words instead use that time in other subjects more important ?.
Sorry that I was in paranoid mode in my first reply, because I really had been thinking about phonetically spelled languages earlier that day.

On my side, I'm not so sure that all kids need to learn how to spell English words and write them, given our current level of speech-to-text tech.

However, they do still need to recognize those words by sight to a great extent (even if their phones can translate signs and menus, for instance).

[As someone trying to learn Chinese, I'm not spending any time learning how to write those characters -- even though doing so might help with memorization -- because I am not likely to need to write much Chinese myself (if ever), and more especially because Chinese-input methods exist for smartphones and computer keyboards.]

Hmm, your thread has inspired this thought: what if there were a phonetic keyboard-input method for English just as there are for Chinese and Japanese?

That way the kids could type things phonetically, but when such an input-method presented options, the students would still need to be able to distinguish (by sight) between English words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings.

(The different spellings of words that sound the same but mean different things is a benefit of those different spellings, for the sake of clarity.)

At least your kids wouldn't have to learn thousands of Chinese characters or Japanese Kanji (plus katakana and hiragana) -- so there are degrees and degrees of difficulty when languages are compared.

Maybe it could be said that just as some seniors do crossword puzzles or sudoku to keep their brains active, young people should learn difficult languages and work through math problems to help their brains develop. 😉

Maybe these days penmanship and remembering how to spell without tech assistance could be advanced topics for the subset of students who would be naturally interested in those skills even without external threats such as bad grades, parental disappointment, or nuns with rulers.

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@rookie54 said
YER

yer welcome
-come as in comb?

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@Paul-Martin said
Because words are pronounced differently in different places.

For instance BOOK
rhymes with Luke in northern England but not in the south
In the south they should spell it "beuque".

(Also, as someone with more than a hint of Martian ancestry, it seems not so much retrograde as peculiar that most or all of Earth's written languages are written in such a linear way. 😉 )