[DocTomoe]

Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.

[bluGill]

Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling, so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read. There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two). In reverse there are often several different phonetic ways to pronounce a written word.

As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)

[LambdaComplex]

> There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two).

And "two" isn't even a phonetic spelling!

[gladiatr72]

Um. You have not read any pre-19th century English-language literature, have you? If you think there are no good rules, expose yourself to how the language was written before there were _any_ such rules. Finnigin's Wake, anything by Cotton Mathers and the like.

[bluGill]

The added rules were just memorize the one correct way to spell. Previously it's was phonetic, and everyone used different spellings. Of course it looks less phonetic if you are unaware of how phonics change. (U and V switched roles as one example)

[gladiatr72]

Previously it was dialectic. To say that different spellings were used by different people dramatically understates the situation. You can find an author using different spelling to express the same word in different contexts in the same volume, because, well, that's the way it was spoken.

I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece was written but the idea of returning to a system (non-system?) of spelling makes my head hurt. At this point, I can read an book or document written (in English) by an Australian, US Southerner, US Baltimore or Indian writer without needing to decode the writer's dialect. Sure, some of that comes out despite using a fixed spelling system, but that gives the text.. I guess I might describe it as _texture_ or _personality_ without detracting from the ideas, stories or info conveyed.

I think 'ou' is still in play in British English (colour, odour, etc) but was removed from the US standard (i think) sometime in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't minor in my 2nd grade teacher's pov when I spelled it `colour` (1978..I had some old comic books at home--I blame them) but from what I understand, such changes were made after a great deal of debate which included discussions on whether the obfuscation of _existing_ text is offset by decreased obfuscation in future writing. I think, rightfully (if you're into that sort of thing), they got it right. I do not miss `colour` but whether or not it is there does not impact my understanding of the sentence.

If there was a credible effort to revert or deprecate spelling, I would be concerned about knowledge and information dissemination reverting to the old pre-reformation model of jealously guarded silos of information/education.

[bluGill]

You need to learn something other than English! Spanish has easy spelling rules because it is one sound = one letter. (except for ll - and they consider that a separate letter). It is easy to spell in Spanish because each letter maps to exactly one sound, and each sound maps to exactly one letter.

We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand languages like French and Polish solve this by having rules of how every letter combination sounds, but I don't know enough of them to explain how it works - but they might be useful inspiration if you don't want to add letters). There should be exactly one way to spell a word, and it should be obvious what that way is by how the word is pronounced.

Of course we also need to reform English so that we all pronounce words the same (goodbye and good riddance to all the funky accents - they sound cool but they hinder communication), and a lot of other related reforms that will never happen.

[gladiatr72]

. if you reversed English/Spanish it would be called "jingoism" . then it wouldn't be English . good luck with that.

[Spooky23]

It's an adaptation to the limitations of phonetical spelling in english.

IIRC, my kid was taught about 100 "sight words" that are usually common words that link stuff together or appear often. Stuff like "who", "the", "which", etc. The kids memorize those and sound out the other stuff. I think the idea is to avoid discouraging kids from getting hung up on common things or memorizing things wrong.