Re: Advanced English to become official!

On Apr 5, 2005 6:11 PM, J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> wrote:

> I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will
> probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not
> interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever
> make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). This
> is a result of how the rules are learnt: Foreigners consciously learn the
> spelling rules at the same instant they learn the language, whereas native
> speakers don't need any explicit rule knowledge. Spelling is taught to
> native speakers at a very early age before the mind develops the ability of
> dealing with an explicit rule, so many of those who aren't interested in
> language won't ever learn the spelling rules but write intuitively.
> (Good Spanish and French examples)
> In cases like these, many non-native speakers are better than many native
> ones (and of course, there's also plenty of similar cases in English).
I learned English as a foreign language. Not only I had to learn the orthography
at the same time I learned the language, I had to learn the Roman alphabet
too, as my language doesn't use the Roman alphabet at all.

As a result, although I can understand in my head that _it's_ and _its_,
_there_ and _their_ sound exactly the same, I cannot really confuse them --
they are written differently, after all! I think I have never got them wrong
in my entire English usage. But I saw that even those native English speakers
who are very good at spelling use it the other way around, and it surprised
me to see that.

Seo Sanghyeon

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