NaturallyResilient

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Yesterday I started with the ASL (American Sign Language) class I am taking but I got distracted. So today I will take up where I left off

The ASL class is just a little introduction class but I have been fascinated. The language actually makes sense to me. I took two years of German in High School and that also made sense to me. It is English that doesn’t make sense.

I have struggled with English most of my life. I am very thankful for spell/grammar checker and my husband who must have another gene for spelling that most engineers don’t have. I do like to write; otherwise I would not be writing so many blogs. I guess I have a lot to say, but sometimes I wish we used a different language than English.

I have learned a splattering of Spanish and it is a very sensible language. So between the various languages I have been exposed to (Spanish, German, ASL) I have decided that English is the oddball. It is a language that you can spell a word the same way but pronounce it differently depending on how it is used for example: lead and (you guessed it) lead. It is also a language where you can spell a word two different ways but they are pronounced the same for example: soul and sole (or back to the previous example: lead and led).

I read once that our founding fathers voted on the language to use in the United States and English beat out German by one vote. I wish it had gone the other way.

I pity the poor soul (this is the correct soul/sole) who has to learn English as a second language. No wonder we have so many people living here who have never learned English and choose to speak their (this is another one: there, their, they’re) native tongue at home.

I think English is so difficult because it has words from so many languages and this makes spelling a nightmare. I saw the tapes the school uses to try and teach phonics and reading to the struggling students. There were over two years worth of tapes! Forty minute sessions daily through the school year of spelling and phonics and exceptions to learn! This is ridiculous.

English has one more little quirk that it shares with only 2 other languages in the world. That is the use of ‘do’. This is a funny little word and many people trying to learn English never master it. If you listen to someone for whom English is a second language and they sound odd, it is because of the ‘do’. They aren’t using it.

Well, if it ever does come to a new vote, I am voting for another language.