

English Is The Toughest European Language To Learn - Freebytes
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1233-english-is-toughest-european-language-to-read.html

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tokenadult
Press release on the same study:

<http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/proct02/dyslexics.html>

(I looked this up to get a better idea which countries were considered, and
which were not.)

Excerpt from a good book on dyslexia by some of the leading researchers in the
field:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=OTMYM5ijMtMC&pg=PA383&#...</a><p>Here's
another good link on dyslexia:<p><a
href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/"
rel="nofollow">http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/</a><p>Here's
a link to a forthcoming book with practical advice to parents about
dyslexia:<p><a
href="http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981X.html"
rel="nofollow">http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981...</a><p>My
overall comments on the submitted article and the claim in its title are:<p>a)
Yes, the English penchant for preserving etymological spellings from multiple
languages (especially Norman French) makes learning reading of English more
daunting than learning to read a language with a reformed, consistent spelling
such as Spanish. But linguists have applied thoughtful effort to improving
reading instruction in English, and it is possible with the best materials,
for example Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and
Clarence Barnhart,<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-
Leonard-Bloomfield/dp/0814311156/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Lets-
Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...</a><p>to make great progress in reading
English independently in less than one year of instruction. (It's regrettable
that more schools don't use superior books like Let's Read for initial reading
instruction.) Part of the difficulty that pupils have in school in English-
speaking countries comes from suboptimal reading instruction rather than from
inherent features of the current English writing system.<p><a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-
Bradford/dp/0262134381/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-
Instruction-Science-Brad...</a><p>b) The study didn't test "European
languages" exhaustively. It may be that there are some languages in Europe
that present similar difficulties. Certainly there are languages in other
regions of the world (including languages in the Indo-European language
family) that present tougher challenges to primary-age learners learning to
read, although those learners often overcome those challenges.<p>c) For
overall adult performance in reading, exposure matters, and for second-
language learners of English, the network effects of having huge numbers of
users of English (both first-language users and second-language users) all
over the world ensures that most second-language learners still reach quite an
adequate level of reading proficiency in English, which indeed in many cases
exploits the similarity of English spelling to spellings from foreign
languages. English gains its position as the world interlanguage honestly and
will not be challenged as the world interlanguage by any other language in the
lifetime of anyone reading this message.

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sharpn
I can't find the full paper online, but it does seem to be a very narrowly
defined idea of language aquisition. It deals only with children learning to
_read_ their native tongue. No allowance is made for any learning outside of
the classroom. No consideration of the difficulty in learning the gender
assignment to words in non-English languages. There are some valid
observations too, but it's a pretty serious leap to draw the conclusion in the
title.

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queensnake
'learn to READ' I want to point out, to help head off lots of needless
argument.

