Re: OT: Slightly OT: French as a second language

On 22 Nov, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Dan Sulani wrote:
> >     Still, in my kids' opinion, even with all the unpronounced "heh"s
and
> > "aleph"s
> > and " 'ayin"s, among other things, Hebrew is still written closer to the
way
> > it is pronounced than is English.
>
> And from what you say, it sounds like you can predict the pronunciation
> completely from the spelling, it's only the other direction that has
> problems.  Whereas English is difficult in both directions.

    I wouldn't say "completely"; but certainly good enough to even be able
to dispense
with the vowel signs in ordinary use of the lang (as in newpapers, books,
movie subtitles,
many signs on stores, etc.).
    In fact, just yesterday, I was working with a 6 year-old first grader.
In first
grade here they are just beginning to learn how to read and all text is
fully
vowel-marked. On a whim, I asked the girl to try and read the un-voweled
text in the balloon of the cartoon we were looking at, and she correctly
guessed
the pronounciation of all the words!


Dan Sulani
-------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.