English is one of the hardest languages to learn to read...maybe it's time to switch to Italian.
No, I'm not really saying we should change our language but you have to admit that the rules for English grammar take a long time to learn.
According to Stanislas Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain it takes about 2 years to grasp reading and pronouncing English as opposed to Italian which takes only a few months to master.
In Italian the pronounciation of letters is much more straightforward....more like a say what you see type of system
French is almost as hard as English but Chinese is probably the worst. A Chinese student needs to learn thousands of characters and is usually studying well into their teens learning them.
Being an expert is not always beneficial.
We speak and communicate in a language that is more difficult than it needs to be. More importantly we forget how hard it is for others to communicate with us because we are suffering from what I call process blindness.
We have become experts who no longer see how difficult something is because we do it without concious effort. At the same time we also don't try to improve the system becuase we are blind to its complexity.
I tried my tongue at Japanese once.
I recall back to my college days learning Japanese which has 3 alphabets - hiragana, katakana and kanji.
I learned hiragana (46 characters) and katakana (5o characters) but stopped at kanji (6000 characters) You need to know about 1900 just to read a newspaper fluently
I decided that honing my Spanish was probably a better choice for me.
Message to Stanislas
I did read your entire book and found it very compelling. It has already changed how I interact with my 2.5 year old. Downside is that I'm seeing proto-letters in everything. LOL
For something a little more humorous on the subject of learning English ..
Gallagher on Language-
