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Showing posts from September, 2013

Silent Spellings

Having worked as a French teacher in the US, I was forced not only to learn French grammar but also reflect on how to explain it and make it understandable to English speakers. I can confidently say that one of the hardest parts of learning French, for beginners anyway, is learning French spelling particularly because of all of the silent letters. However, I was surprised to find after living in France that the French themselves have problems spelling. Whereas certain languages such as Spanish and Italian are phonetic, meaning words are spelled as they sound, for French this is not the case.  English is also particularly difficult for spelling, and like French, is also not a phonetic language. Think about it, why are the pronunciations of ‘enough’ ‘through’ and ‘though’ all different? This is very difficult for people learning English. School spelling bees are a great example of a way we have tried to make an activity out of learning English spelling. To specify the