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Reading the Crazy Language of English
When did you learn how to read? I am 39 years old and, honestly, I can not recall when I learned to read or who taught me. Was it my mother, my teacher, or a little of both? Even though I can’t recall the details, I can assume that I was taught through memorization. I know this because five years ago, my husband and I came up with the wild idea to homeschool our children. “How hard can this be?” I thought. I know how to read, write and even add, subtract, multiply and divide. No problem! However, teaching someone how to read the English language is actually quite difficult. I can not tell you how many times I told my boys, “That word is a sight word, it does not follow the rules.” To illustrate, why does the word, “You” sound like the long “U”. According to one of the English rules of “ou,” is it sounds like “ow” and the “y” has the sound “ya.” Try explaining to a 5 year old that it is not “Yaow,” it does not make any sense and just say, the long “U.” I was starting to sound like a broken record. By the way we did break a phonics tape because we played it over and over again just trying to remember all the rules.
I learned Spanish in high school and I currently teach my sons Sign Language, while learning it myself. Being exposed to these other languages, I often wish English could be a little simpler. Sign Language is based on a visual concept and Spanish, like most foreign languages, has rules that make sense. The English Language has more exceptions to the rules than any other language, plus, it even has exceptions to the exceptions. For example, “i” before “e” except after “c”…except for words like neighbor and weigh. Questions like, “Why is English so difficult? Who on Earth made up this language?” often floated around in my head. Then one day while reading my Bible, I came up with a theory as to why English is such a difficult language. I believe that there was a certain group from Genesis 11 that really upset God. During the building of the “Tower of Babel,” the whole world had only one language. As they continued to grow in numbers and in intelligence, “They said to each other, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” (Genesis 11: 4) I imagined a man named Englerd, who must have been shooting off his mouth even more than the others during that time. Englerd probably was the leader of one particular group because we know that every crowd has at least one who eggs them on. God knew that His people were getting too big for their britches and Englerd was head Pantaloon, thus, God decided to confuse their language so that they would not understand each other. Englerd and his followers must have been assigned the most difficult one of the new languages. The Bible tells us that God scattered them over the face of the whole Earth. Consequently, Englerd ended up in the area we now know as England with his new language, English, named after him.
My sons are now 10, 10, 6 and 3. I have successfully taught two of them to read and the third is doing quite well with his reading skills. I still have the 3 year old to teach and all I can say is thank you to God, the Master of all languages, for helping me because teaching someone how to read English is just crazy. (Use the long “a” because the “y” acts like an “e”!)
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