Spelling Bee

[Woochifer]

What were you guys reading, My point was that our (English) has such a mix of varies languages that its hard to master. Which points out how others around the world have taught their children English from grade school along with their native tongue, and excel in academics But our kids don't normally get a chance to pick a second language until middle school. We get all impress when we meet a child from an another country who speaks 2-3 languages, but for them its normal. And for those who watch lastnight, you may have notice that good majority of the finalist where first generation Americas, parents foreign born. The kid that took second was from Canada.

When I took French in high school, what struck me was how much more consistent the pronunciations are with French and the other romance languages compared with English (at least the way that it's spoken in contemporary America). English is not an easy language to learn, not just because of how many different influences get thrown into the mix and the commonly accepted rules on language usage evolve so quickly (the U.S. does not have an official language ministry like the Academie Francaise to set the rules and decide what words are "official"), but also because we're constantly inventing new words and/or new metaphorical slang phrases.

Just in California (or CalEEfornia as our Austrian-born governor says), the majority of the place names are Spanish origin, but the commonly accepted pronunciations are all over the map making for a rather perilous minefield for anyone coming here, whether from another country or another state. For example, San Diego and San Juan Batista uses the original Spanish language pronunciation (i.e., dee-AY-go and bah-TEE-stah), while places like San Pedro and San Rafael are completely Anglicanized (san PEE-droh and san reh-fell, rather than san PAY-droh and san rah-FI-el), and still others are more of a pick and choose option like Ignacio Valley (pronounced as either ig-NAY-sho or ig-NAH-SEE-oh).

Just imagine the puzzled looks when ESL students hear or read "jump the shark" for the first time! Or even imagine someone from 12th Century England trying to converse with a 21st Century American! (Reading texts from Old English, it is almost like viewing a foreign language)

With the spelling bee, I think a lot of that comes from the way that immigrant children frequently have to learn English in more a formal structured manner where they learn to speak the language concurrently with how to read and write in English. They don't pick it up intuitively at home because English might not be the primary language spoken.

The winner of this year's spelling bee (who's from the Bay Area BTW) said that it's all memorization. And in the past, a lot of the spelling bee finalists were home schooled (as famously satirized in a South Park episode), again with immersive memorization.