r/MadeMeSmile 22h ago

Good Vibes ESL classes be like

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u/dogsledonice 21h ago edited 9h ago

I've taught ESL. You don't truly grasp how stupid a language English is until you try to explain parts of it to someone in words they can understand

or why these all sound different: bough, bought, through, thorough, slough, tough, hiccough

(edit: I think two of them do rhyme; not sure which)

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u/spacewarp2 18h ago

Tbf this is like every language. I remember taking Japanese and wondering why a certain pattern didn’t exist that would’ve made sense before remembering English has plenty of those. I’m guessing every language has those.

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u/dogsledonice 18h ago

Also funny with Japanese: the people there will argue for hours that Chinese characters are necessary to comprehend their language; they can't use solely a phonetic alphabet.

Then I ask if they speak in Chinese characters. Then I remind them that *I* don't know which Chinese characters are used for the words I'm speaking, but still can speak it with them. Their brains can't wrap around that.

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u/Queen_Euphemia 17h ago

Sure, I mean you could write Japanese in cyrillic and it would work too, it isn't really a language well suited to characters like Chinese is, but if you use the same tactics that Japanese does to adapt them then we could use them in English.

Why should we have spaces in our sentences when "I棲in米利堅for現在." seems like a perfectly reasonable way to write a sentence?

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u/dogsledonice 9h ago

Because learning 26 characters is far easier and more productive than learning 3,000