If you’re one of those people who can easily learn a new language, I envy you.
Thankfully learning another language has never been a necessity for me except the one semester of Spanish I took in high school.
But several of the people who have come to live in our country have told me that English is very difficult to learn and to read and write.
A woman from China who has lived here for 5 years told me she still doesn’t understand the “SILLY STUFF.”
I looked puzzled so she gave me the example of “You let the cat out of the bag.” She thought her neighbor was missing her cat.
When that same neighbor said her husband “had fallen off the wagon,” she asked if he was injured. The neighbor said, “No, but he will be!”
Recently an acquaintance who moved here from Italy when she was in 4th grade said she learned to speak English by watching cartoons and “Sesame Street.” But she said that writing English was the most difficult part, adding. “Especially the SILENT ONES.”
The silent ones? “Yes,” she said, “you write but don’t say.”
Oh, silent letters.
She wanted to know why they are necessary. Without drawing a breath she came up with “Like knife starts with a K and you don’t say K-nife. Why does lamb end in a b? You don’t say lamB.”
All wound up she said she was a good speller except for the DUMB WORDS and explained Dumb Words are the ones that are pronounced the same but spelled differently.
She recalled a spelling test in grade school. She missed the word wood because she spelled it w-o-u-l-d. Also stare and stair. Missed that one too.
She is now an American citizen, but at 45, she’s still mad at the English language!
She said, “Bonnie, you’re a writer of words. Do you know why they made English so hard?”
I told her, “NO, I don’t K-now.”
