revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)

[@austync3798]

I can’t believe that PCUES struggles with the most basic and common English words such as fhqwhgads

[@NathanDudani]

Lmao

[@mbdg6810]

😂

[@livedandletdie]

I mean it has a pronunciation... fhqwhgads. p͡ɸq̟͡χ̟ɢɔds It's not too hard to say... it's like the pf in German apfel, like the Scouser k, like the G in gaudy in Aussie, obviously the normal english a followed by d s.. See I can even pronounce that... the easy part is the ending because it's almost exactly like the English word gods. Mostly because English is a linguistic nightmare. Not compared to it's dialect Scouser, but still.

[@candlehawk]

everybody to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on fhqwhgads.

[@ryrieee]

yeah pronounce xnopyt smartass

[@TheKacperuss]

So, if I understand it correctly, "double u" consists of 7 silent letters and a hidden "w"

[@sergey1519]

and the system can't show the hidden letters so it shows it to be just the 7 silent letters

[@roruda]

No its 5 silent letters, then you glue the two u's together to make w.

[@Otherversian]

Yes, clearly, it’s spelt "Double U" with all silent letters an invisible, long vowel W.

[@Xnoob545]

*long w

[@redgeoblaze3752]

Also, in French it's called Double-V, and pronounced as such if we're talking about germanic based languages.

[@pflh2391]

it goes from "this is from a cute little non profit organization that has a noble cause" to "this sucks lmao" really fast

[@alexnoman1498]

Those are frequently seen together... Once you're highbrow enough plus helping the children™ you'll always make it to christmas somehow. And being too small for critics to pay attention, you'll never see the flaws...

[@bigpooper4156]

ngl i thought your pfp was a closed eye with with hair on the face like the boat looks like a closed eye and the tree looks like hair

[@JohnDiGrizUkraine]

@@alexnoman1498 hey, fellow scholar of invisible arts :)

[@TheRabbitPoet]

You can have both. The organization is cute and their cause noble, but the execution does suck

[@lia6771]

Regardless of how good or not good PCUES' look might be from an aesthetic standpoint, I think it would be HELL for dyslexic children.

[@timothymclean]

Ah yes, a tool to help kids learn how to read that is virtually unusable by the kids who need the most help.

[@jh29a]

"h *l* "

[@gingerale1591]

yooo absa pfp love to see other rivals players in the wild

[@PhoenixFireKMS]

I’m a special ed teacher and that was my exact first thought XD

[@GuiSmith]

I sub-specialise in UX design and it immediately tripped my bad formatting detector. It’s hard to tell what formatting is even going on sometimes. Weird italics, tilts, and bolds are not easy to recognise for someone starting to learn the shapes of letters (including as part of secondary languages where the person in question uses the Latin alphabet in a different way natively) or if you have any sort of neurodivergence in grapheme recognition. Dyslexia, dyscalculia, and grapheme synethesia are all more common than you’d think. All these weird changes make the letters appear to be completely new (and maybe inscrutable) to people who experience those conditions, which makes the attempt to preserve spelling beyond pointless.

[@ssj3gohan456]

The more I think about this, the worse it gets. I think you just scratched the surface. Let's think about PCUES strictly as an educational tool: - Kids learn how to read and write at about the same time. We already know that fonts in general fuck a lot with the speed at which kids learn to write, now we're bringing in modified letters to an already not-writing-like font? Like, back in the day when I was learning cursive and capital letters, there was a huge discussion already on whether cursive s and a should be changed to better reflect common glyph forms. That's just two letters that often take a few days to properly get into kids' brains. - Dyslexia. Wow, this is horrible. Some things are fine - rotating an r at the end of the word should be legible. But wider and bold letters in the middle of a word? That's going to fuck massively with glyph direction in the mind of a dyslexic child. - PCUES commonly teaches single word pronunciation but not systematics. A lot. Spelling, dwelling, fire, wire, one, won are PQ'ed similarly but represent wildly different systematics. This is basically completely against modern teaching techniques that emphasize systematization over rote memorization. PCUES is not part of a complete education system, and mixing educational styles comes with a switching cost for both kids and teachers. Conversely, having interlocking and referenceable teaching techniques across subjects is massively helpful. - I think the worst part is just the nonportability of any of the principles behind PCUES into late childhood and adulthood. We teach and use teaching tools that aren't just useful to one age group and one subject - teaching tools and subjects are chosen to be of particular value in your entire life. IPA or furigana would actually be useful your entire life. PCUES only (arguably) solves one very small problem in learning to read. You have to look at the opportunity cost of spending that much time with an otherwise useless teaching tool.

[@Bushwhacker-so4yk]

The bold thing, OMG! Merphy Napier, a dyslexic KZbinr, has said in a video that her brain automatically skips over bold print.

[@sineadthomas2024]

OH NO DYSLEXIA! THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!

[@cynthius6567]

The systematics thing is really a huge issue. Kids are going to see how PCUES lists out words as "this letter is silent", "this letter is pronounced as its name" and form an understanding of English pronunciation based on the assumption that that is how you determine a word's pronunciation. That it's about knowing what arbitrary letters are silent and which are just "their name", and that's going to be something any child learning from PCUES will have to spend time actively UNLEARNING. And given that PCUES presents pronunciation as completely arbitrary, I can see it being very frustrating for a child with autism to learn with it. What could have been a time to show them the consistencies English does have, and teach them how to pronounce words on their own, is now an experience that is teaching them there's no such consistency and so its impossible to pronounce anything correctly until someone has told them how its pronounced.

[@eugene_rat_slap]

I don't even have dyslexia and some letters were still floating around. Must be absolute hell trying to read this sorta thing

[@jjkthebest]

I learned English mostly by osmosis, so can you explain to me how spelling and dwelling are different systems? Or fire and wire

[@codeender5980]

their reply really bothers me... it's extremely passive-aggressive and entitled. The equivalent of "I reject all other opinions that differ from my own, but you need to be more open to accept mine"

[@ericeaton2386]

Me too. It felt super disrespectful.

[@MissPoplarLeaf]

Yeah the condescending tone was the worst part. As if it's not a valid question to ask, even though it's what every English speaker would wonder after they see the system.

[@Salsmachev]

@@balrogdahomie I went looking, but couldn't find the anti-phonics video you mentioned. Do you have a link? I definitely saw that anti-phonics comment responding to what I infer to be an actual teacher though. Yikes. I get that not everyone loves phonics (even in my family, my brother was whole language, I was phonics), but to just dismiss it outright is gonna take some serious research I doubt they have.

[@otesunki]

@@Salsmachev kzbin.info/www/bejne/q57RhYF4ntScjJY i think

[@otesunki]

@@Salsmachev ctrl+f for You did manage to pick some two examples (hiccough and pinata) where our system doesn’t do a good job (and no system does). How do you represent and explain the “ya” sound in pinata or the ending “up” sound in “hiccough”? No system is perfect, the orthography is too bizarrely convoluted for that. The challenge is to significantly reduce the confusion THE LEARNER EXPERIENCES (not the already literate mind imagines). Our system reduces the confusion in about 100,000 English words. I can understand and engage in a conversation about the tactical reasons to make this kind of tech more phonics friendly. However, there is nothing “right” about phonics

[@ByzantineDarkwraith]

They literally acknowledge that the connection learners make between the letters and their letter names can trip them up when learning… So they decided to do *literally everything in their power to reinforce that connection* … WHY??!

[@asterling4]

right??? great way to ensure that kids have a slightly easier time their first year or so learning to read, and then _struggle worse than every other child_ for the next _several_ years as they try to unlearn this insanity

[@ericdculver]

That's horrible! Instead of say, writing a new ABC song that teaches the most common letter sounds? Or using one of the bazillions that already exist? Sorry, I am just extremely emotional about this injustice.

[@timothymclean]

It helps the children intuit how the pronunciation of words where that association happens to be helpful.

[@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit]

That's why they taught the ABCs without the letter names in my school (so just the pronounciation of the letter. Made easier by the fact that my native language's spelling actually makes sense).

[@juandiegovalverde1982]

@@Idkpleasejustletmechangeit For centuriez, dhear hav been moovments to refórm dhe spelling ov dhe Inglish languige. Such spelling refórm seeks to change Inglish orthografi so dhat it iz mor consístent, machiz pronunciátion better, and followz dhe alfabétic principel. Common motivz for spelling refórm inclúd making lerning quikker, making lerning cheeper, and making Inglish mor useful az an international auxiliari languige. Refórm propósalz vari in termz ov dhe depth ov dhe linguístic changiz and bi dhear implementátionz. In termz ov riting sistemz, mowst spelling refórm propósals ar moderat; dhei use dhe traditional Inglish alfabet, tri to manetéin dhe familiar shapes ov werdz, and tri to manetéin common convéntionz (such az silent e). Mor radical propósalz invólv adding or remóoving letterz or simbolz or even creáting neu alfabets. Som refórmerz prefér a gradual change ímplementid in stagiz, while odherz favor an imediat and total refórm for aul. Som exámpelz ov mi propósal: feer (fear); thru (through); dho (though); thaut (thought); thoro (thorough, /ˈθʌɹəʊ/); thora (thorough, /ˈθʌɹə/); tuf (tough); trof (trough, /tɹɒf/); trauf (trough, /tɹɔf/); plou (plough); bow (bow, /bəʊ/); bou (bow, /baʊ/); beri (bury); Lester (Leicester), heffer (heifer); hed (head); evri (every /ˈevɹi/); evveri /ˈevəɹi/); fone (phone); protest (noun); protést (verb); won (one); too (two); for (four); sevven (seven); eit (eight); ilévven (eleven); twelv (twelve); nite (night); nife (knife); gowst (ghost); nou (now); werk (work); lov (love); moov (move); dout (doubt); butiful (beautiful); pritti (pretty); Woostersher (Worcestershire, /ˈwʊstə(ɹ)ʃə(ɹ)/); Woostershir (Worcestershire, /ˈwʊstə(ɹ)ʃɪə(ɹ)/); suttel (subtle); littel (little); gowld (gold); guet (get); bild (build); desert (desert, /ˈdezə(ɹ)t/; desért (desert, /dɪˈzɜː(ɹ)t/); extasi (ecstasy); sicologi (psychology); bak (back); hart (heart); bool (bull), lam (lamb); luk (luc); guerl (girl); Shicáago (Chicago); Arkansaw (Arkansas); etc.

[@malefactory]

I'm unsure if this is helpful to you as a content creator, but I find this to be extremely engaging and I appreciate the direction you're taking this channel.

[@nzubechukwu]

Agreed.

[@Ad_Asterisk]

I want to second this with the caveat that the weird shit you post about games is appreciated also

[@Xnoob545]

I agree but man your English is good I could never write a comment so good

[@Supertimegamingify]

Yeh

[@ThatChimpBoy]

@@Supertimegamingify YeH

[@EebstertheGreat]

Now that there is an edge case for "one," PCUES will say that the W is silent in "wonder."

[@Cloiss_]

*1* der

[@nuggit2541]

When you roll a natural 20 on your wisdom check

[@alexnoman1498]

oh no you're right... Using Rhymedesk's IPA search I found than "one" and "wonder" are indeed the only word stems that are affected, therefore implicating only words like "anyone" or "wonderland".

[@appa609]

bullshit

[@appa609]

there's a W consonant on "one"

[@rikafurude6275]

That ‘hypothetical’ scenario you discussed with not pronouncing certain names is actually something that happened to me as a kid! I had a copy of this educational science pc game or something, the kind you get from some magazine, and for whatever reason it had a button next to the ‘Enter Name’ text field that would read whatever was in it with text-to-speech. Since my birthname is Gaelic, it pronounced it completely wrong. But as I was quite young I just believed what it said and that I must have been saying it wrong! I did work out it was the computer pronouncing it wrong due to limitations not too long after though!

[@alexnoman1498]

Horrifying! Glad you were smart enough to figure it out. This stuff should be taught to programmers! (being one myself)

[@jossc8280]

There was a paint program on the computers in our elementary school that most of us would play with during computer class. It had a feature where you could type in text and it would read it. It didn't work well - and I remember the entire class having a blast typing in things (including our names, our friends' names, confessions of who you had a crush on, etc.) and listening to the computer try to pronounce them. I thought of this immediately when he brought up the scenario and thought "it wouldn't upset anyone; we all thought it was hilarious when it couldn't pronounce things!". I then realized, though, that I have a common and easy-to-pronounce name, and I'm just realizing, 15 years later, it may not have been so hilarious to the kids whose names it mispronounced. Oops. (I don't think anyone would've concluded that they were pronouncing their own name wrong, though, because it also mispronounced like a third of English.)

[@RyanTosh]

@@jossc8280 I guess the difference is, nobody was telling you from a young age that that was a tool which would always tell you the correct way to pronounce a word :p

[@hughcaldwell1034]

I luckily never had this problem with technology. "Hugh" isn't exactly phonetic, but it follows enough common English patterns and is common enough in itself that most TTS is fine with it. No, my problem was spelling my name backwards as a child because the "g" is silent so there's no reason to think it should occur after the "u" rather than before (until you've got the hang of English spelling), so I'd often write it "Hguh". Also kids had a suprisingly hard time with it, calling me "Queue". I think the /h/ followed by the yod messed them up. Though Hugo never seemed to have much trouble.

[@fiaTheFae]

While I was lucky to learn quickly that I wasn't pronouncing it wrong myself, I grew up with a Gaelic first and last name in pretty-damn-white, America, so I can if not empathize, strongly sympathize

[@dard1515]

When you said, "Ok, here's The Thing," I envisioned a version of this video that just cut to The Thing (1982) and quickly decided that the only reason not to do that is because of the comparative difference in length for that joke.

[@tiktaalik1200]

Same

[@benwiarda23]

Haha this is amazing, but you wouldn't need to show the whole movie you can just cut the joke off after a second and then only a few people would get it and appreciate it

[@bigpooper4156]

i mean it follows the same format as the "so that's y" and "with that zed" puns lol

[@SnoFitzroy]

@@benwiarda23 You could even just use the title screen of the film so everyone at least knows it's the title that's being referenced (rather than an important scene and people not in the know being like "is that character called The Thing???"

[@zyaicob]

That's a super old school game theory joke

[@Erin-ks4jp]

A small note on the aesthetics, I do think it *is* a problem actually. The decisions that they have made in how to represent their annotations are simply not very readable - which for us adults is only a minor annoyance, but it does actually matter for the target audience of the system. The furigana style approach, or even the annotated english approach works better for me, as it clearly appears as an addition or an annotation, rather than a part of or alteration to the word itself - plus it's incredibly readable. You don't have to worry about the difference between grey and the usual font color, you don't have to worry about bold-face or non-bold-face. Instead relevant information is made very obvious (by appearing in a space usually left blank), whenever it is necessary. It doesn't have to look pretty, but it does, I think, have to be readable. Anyway, that's my comment as a linguistics nerd obsessed in particular with the interaction between the use of a language and its orthography and typography (an obsession that is entirely your fault jan Misali!)

[@verdiss7487]

I'm also concerned that it might cause some wire crossing and lead to kids thinking they have to write r's as angled if it's pronounced er, outside the pcues system. Handwriting is already hard enough, introducing writing rules which don't actually exist seems like a problem. Given that kids have generally poor handwriting, it would also make it difficult for a teacher to realize if they are expending effort to write like pcues.

[@ookazi1000]

I strongly agree, except, I'd take it one further and say that it does have to look pretty.

[@darksidecola4529]

It also seems like it could be an accessibility issue for kids with dyslexia, who are already gonna have a rough time in this area, though i am not dyslexic so feel free to correct me.

[@Salsmachev]

@@verdiss7487 Yeah if kids already write at different widths and with an irregular baseline, this could be a problem. Colour, bolding, etc. is also not great since it would potentially require underfunded schools to shell out for better quality printers and colour printing. Given how many worksheets I've taken home over the years that were badly copied black and white versions of a badly printed black and white original of a full pristine colour pdf, I'm not sure the school system can handle pcues.

[@IONATVS]

yeah, I can’t imagine how kids with bad eyesight will be expected to differentiate between regular, bold, and grey letters. furigana seems much more natural.

[@JacksonBockus]

Okay I know you’re taking their word for it that they somewhat know what they’re talking about, but any time someone responds to criticism with “you clearly just need to expand your mind to see how we’re actually correct” it sets off my bullshit detectors immediately.

[@RyanTosh]

Help, I expanded my mind too much and now it doesn't fit anymore

[@shytendeakatamanoir9740]

@@RyanTosh When they say "expand your mind", what they actually mean is that you should replace the content of your mind by the one they're giving you without further asking. Don't worry, it's a common mistake

[@RyanTosh]

@@shytendeakatamanoir9740 I know what it means, just joking around :p

[@RedHair651]

totally

[@dustinm2717]

Yeah, that response just sounded incredibly entitled and elitist to me If there is one thing that seriously annoys me it's people that just assume that they are obviously right because of some arbitrary qualification, and people that shoot down any criticism that doesn't conform to their perspective with what essentially boils down to an over written no u because how could they possibly be wrong with their [insert qualification here]

[@coin0matic]

I think my biggest issue with that corporate reply, is that it ignores that while yes, kids learn abc's before they learn to spell, by the time they've learned their abc's they've learned the basics of english speech, and are familiar with how words *sound*.

[@defenestrated23]

This is why the whole "Hebbian bottleneck" thing is completely neuroscience BS, even if we take their theory as correct (it's not). Children spend thousands of hours soaked in exposure to English speech and writing. However much time they spend hearing/singing the alphabet song, it pales in comparison to all else they have experienced.

[@Painocus]

@@defenestrated23 It wasn't English, but I do remember this being something I had a problem with when I learned to read, until I figured out on my own to just ignore the letter-names the teachers were correcting me with and memorize the actual sounds instead. So it is a problem at-least some kids has. *But* I don't think the solution is for teachers to teach kids that the letter-names are the actual sounds, that English words have even more pointless letters than it does, and that every time, say, L doesn't follow E it's irregular, making the actual spelling allways non-phonetic, all of which the kids have to unlearn at some point anyways, instead of just having teatchers put more focus on the sounds rather than the names. Also the ABC-song is not meant to teach kids reading and shouldn't be used that way anyways. It's meant to teach kids the order of the alphabet, and that's it. Here's my teatching reform; instead of teachers training kids by pointing to an L and going "what letter is that?" and and the correct answer being "el", have them ask "what sound does that make" and have the kids go "lllll". Avoids the entire problem without the kids having to learn a bunch of extra stuff just to fix an earlier mistake, which itself would also have to be fixed later by relearning another bunch of stuff.

[@joanagomes1898]

@@Painocus Also not english but I actualy was taught like that. I was told that each letter represents a sound (and sometimes that sound is easy to remember because its in the name). When a child couldn't pronouce a word the our teacher would actually ask what sound does that letter make. And apparently 40yrs ago, it used to be very common for consonats to have a "second name" that was just their sound or the consonant plus(I don't know IPA but in portuguese we spell it ê)

[@Zestieee]

If children actually associated the letter names as their actual sound imagine how Greek kids must feel growing up

[@weirdlanguageguy]

Or Israeli or Arab kids

[@Salsmachev]

@@weirdlanguageguy Arabic isn't actually that bad. The only big annoyance would be that the letter names have a hamza at the end. A word like ṭā'ir would actually be pronounced like ط, and then a bunch of silent letters, and then a ِ and a ر sounded out

[@sudonim7552]

Chinese kids, on the other hand...

[@akeem2983]

@@sudonim7552 "I can see the sound!"

[@ndescruzur4378]

@Ng John lambda mu alfa omicron!

[@jasmijnisme]

The real solution is to teach children IPA at the same time as reading and writing. They should learn the æβç's at the same time as the ABC's! /s

[@columbus8myhw]

ç really destroying the IPA's goal of "no diacritics unless it modifies the sound in a generalizable way"

[@Cloiss_]

i tried to pronounce [æβç] and my mouth was not very happy

[@MattMcIrvin]

The ITA was almost that--it was a sort of IPA for kids, with some symbols modified to make them closer to English letters. The idea there was that kids were supposed to learn to read in ITA *first*, since it was so regular, and then somehow transfer those skills to reading English in regular orthography. It turned out that mostly made learning to read harder rather than easier, so it fell out of favor. I'm pretty sure one of my little friends in the early 1970s had some storybooks that were actually printed in ITA.

[@mollof7893]

@@Cloiss_ not that hard imo

[@MattMcIrvin]

reading that again, the phrase "IPA for kids" just conjures up horrifying images "yeah, this is the hoppiest Kool-Aid I've ever tasted"

[@PiercingSight]

"Do you hear the 'e' in 'spelling'? No." This tells me that they didn't include this weird rule of bold letters sounding like their names to cater to kids that think letters sound like their names, but they included it because *they legitimately believe that that's why those words are pronounced that way.* I don't know how to respond to that.

[@MinorLG]

I hear an ə in spellinɡ, and in fact, i hear both lˈs as the sylible break occurs between them in my reɡional pronounciation.

[@hughcaldwell1034]

Right? I'm f*cking astounded by this. The vast majority of the time, this isn't the case. Why do they think letter names work this way? It makes no sense if you know anything about English and is also treating kids as too stupid to learn the difference between a letter name and the sound it makes, playing to the mistake rather than correcting it. I'm legitimately angry about this.

[@landsgevaer]

@@hughcaldwell1034 Yes, they artificially enforce the rule that (bold) letters sound like their name, at the cost of introducing a whole bunch of artificially silent letters that are completely arbitrary and more difficult to comprehend. It is like saying that every tree has apples because kids learn to draw trees with apples in them, and then having to argue that in a pear tree the apples are there but hidden, and some extra pears have been added.

[@lahagemo]

im so confused by their claim that you don’t hear the e nor the second l in spelling, because i do?? if it were written as speling i’d have pronounced the e as ɛː or something along those lines ... maybe that’s just because of how we were taught spelling in norwegian, but to me there’s oftentimes a noticeable change that occurs in a word if it loses a double consonant (not saying this is a hard and fast rule, ofc)

[@landsgevaer]

@@lahagemo In Dutch too, there is spelling (meaning the same, spelling) and speling (meaning slack/wiggle room), but pronounced entirely differently.

[@consciouscode8150]

That response from PCUES drips of "we had an idea and already dumped thousands into it before realizing it was a mistake too late to actually back out, so we are 100% correct and no one can tell us otherwise"

[@Nukestarmaster]

Actually, I think it more sounds like "we genuinely think our system is mostly perfect and we must crush the unbelievers in incoherent nonsense".

[@skyworm8006]

@@Nukestarmaster Yeah. Basically cultists who have no idea what they're doing.

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

But the thing is that the basic setup of their system actually does have merit, it's just that they added some insane rules which need to be adjusted: 1. The name of the letter is only relevant for vowels (i.e. it's the "long" version of that letter's sound). You DO pronounce the "E" in spelling! It's just a short "E", because it's followed by two consonants. That's also the entire point of the second "L". 2. If a word's pronunciation significantly differs from the spelling, then just say so. I think their response is just someone who's spent so much time thinking these rules out to extremes, that they can't recognize how insane they've made them.

[@johnchessant3012]

"expediency" is *x.p.d.n.c* (I checked, their website actually does that)

[@feryth]

sounds reasonable

[@3u-n3ma_r1-c0]

this is a catastrophe.

[@ByzantineDarkwraith]

No… seriously? I really don’t get how they like to babble on about how the association between letters and letter names often trips up people who are trying to learn to read… and their solution is to try to STRENGTHEN THAT ASSOCIATION IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE…. Like whyyyyy

[@zecuse]

Now I'm wondering what the longest English word is that's pronounced exclusively as letters of the alphabet!

[@devofficialchannel]

"Xpdnc" sounds more like a hypothetical future slang.

[@CyborusYT]

shoutout to the patrons named "is this supposed to be your real name" and "The Entire Population of Greenland"

[@calrogman]

ricin lookin fresh doe

[@joshuasims5421]

The entire population of Greenland could be subscribed for all we know, given jan Misali's subscriber count.

[@CyborusYT]

@@joshuasims5421 Oh, good point

[@benjaminherrera1987]

im almost sure I've seen The Entire Population of Greenland supporting other creators, what a nice entity!

[@bigpooper4156]

@@benjaminherrera1987 must be quite a nice country considering their good taste in youtube content

[@unvergebeneid]

I knew the British pronounced zebra differently, I just didn't know it was like "zedbruh."

[@alexnoman1498]

zeh-bruh sounds so memey xD I'm inclined towards zeebrah myself.

[@Huntracony]

@@thekathal Watch the video before commenting.

[@kaon9101]

bruh moment

[@cameronscott9399]

Yknow, it's weird to think there are ppl who would hear the zee bruh pronounciation and find it odd. Like... That's just what the word is here?

[@ruaridhusher4373]

@@cameronscott9399 mate quite a few American dialects pronounce vowels with a lot less reduction and often longer than in britain, so we hear many words as slightly off

[@LilyTengoku]

omg it's the rhythm heaven guy back with another language video

[@givrally]

This guy does it all. Math, language, and Rhythm Heaven. My major in university, an extremely interesting subject, and my favorite game. That's the perfect channel right there.

[@helloiamenergyman]

To me it's the mashups guy. >Neil Cicierega? No, the other mashups guy. >William Maranci? No the *other* other mashups guy

[@tux1468]

omg it's the language guy back with another rhythm heaven video

[@tux1468]

@@helloiamenergyman Oneboredjeu?

[@TheIdiothead]

Oh is Jan no longer the hangman guy?

[@simplycinema4d975]

If a child used this system and then tried to learn how to write any other language that uses the latin script, they would kinda have to relearn almost everything about reading

[@crackedemerald4930]

I've heard that the Egyptian script uses characters that sound like what the Egyptians would call them. So the symbol for "owl" would sound like whatever "owl" sounds like in Egyptian. Might be completely wrong, but it's an interesting idea.

[@alexnoman1498]

That's a fun fact but a horrible justification xD Egyptian hieroglyphs shouldn't enter the discussion here :p And yes, it's atrocious and shortsighted and inconsistent and prevents finding patterns. Plus, >98% of letter occurences in all words cannot in fact be pronounced like the letter name and there's no way to know the difference! Bold just means long pronounce, not "letter name here" so there's zero clue as to when than arcane rule applies!

[@pie75]

@@crackedemerald4930 the Egyptian hieroglyphs work by having a symbol of something represent the sound/letter at the beginning of its name, comparatively, in English, such a system would mean a picture of a Frog ( 𓆏 ) would be the letter 'F', and the word 'frog' could possibly be spelled like this: 𓆏𓁖𓃾𓅭 (frog- rear - ox - goose)

[@crackedemerald4930]

@@pie75 that's pretty interesting, thanks for educating me on that. Would this make the language hard to decipher like i thought?

[@Salsmachev]

@@crackedemerald4930 It can actually make things easier, since you have a bunch of clues about both meaning and sound, so if you have say, a working knowledge of Coptic, and you know the word is frog, then you can map the sounds of the Coptic word for frog onto the ancient Egyptian spelling and get a decent guess at what sounds the other characters represent. This is a waaaaay oversimplified version of how it actually worked, but if you want some deeper dives you could check out Nativlang's long video Thoth's Pill and shorter video on the additional layers of complexity in later heiroglyphic inscriptions.

[@indigohalf]

I've always thought furigana were super neat. You can do so many fun things with them! In manga you'll see furigana added to all sorts of things, and you can put things other than hiragana in the furigana position too. Sometimes you'll see kanji there as a sort of subtitle when a character is speaking a language other than Japanese.

[@angeldude101]

HTML has a tag that lets you annotate arbitrary text with any other arbitrary text. You can even nest tags to annotate your annotations, or just chance other things like formatting. I wouldn't even be surprised if you could put things that aren't even text in there.

[@seneca983]

"I've always thought furigana were super neat." Though I would argue that if the Japanese actually used a sensible script, furigana wouldn't be needed. I think the Koreans did the right thing when they largely abandoned hanja for hangul. (Hanja are still used for some purposes but much less so than kanji.)

[@indigohalf]

@@seneca983 it's fun tho Also lol @ "the Japanese" and "the Koreans" like they're sports teams

[@seneca983]

@@indigohalf How should I call them? English isn't my first language.

[@indigohalf]

@@seneca983 It isn't grammatically wrong, but it makes it sound like the people of Japan are a uniform group that decided collectively to use a highly complicated writing system just to be annoying. I'm sure there are people in Japan who want to reform the writing system, maybe switch to hiragana only or whatever. There are also people in Japan who are proud of the writing system and think the complexity and flexibility are beautiful.

[@ochrence]

What a bizarrely arrogant response to your initial comments on their system. The specific names that we give to letters are completely arbitrary and vary from region to region. The only reason children associate letters in a word with these specific names is that they are taught to do so. If you were to teach them to read starting with words instead of individual letters, there would be no need for misrepresenting how the Latin alphabet works through these weird bolded letters.

[@wilh3lmmusic]

Z E D

[@fernandobanda5734]

To be fair, it's obvious they're not trying to encompass all English dialects.

[@gamermapper]

I guess that for Greeks, for αλφάβητο (alphabet), only the α (alpha) and β (beta) are pronounced and the rest is silent 😒

[@NStripleseven]

The idea of having the pronunciation above unusual spellings of sounds is a really good one, and I think it may even be intuitive enough and show where the sound comes from well enough to be useful in pcues itself. Though of course I’m not even slightly qualified to be saying anything like that.

[@aaronstephen3058]

Okay, but are there radio shows every week broadcasted in this revolutionised spelling?

[@xiaolin867]

He was born in the 90s so he wouldn't know what a radio is sorry (Editado:) People aren't getting the joke. Time for the obligatory "r/woooosh"

[@griffinking4755]

new radio shows?

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

They say this is a revolutionary spelling, but did anyone ever write Moby Dick with it? I don’t think so.

[@xiaolin867]

@@felipevasconcelos6736 But what about if they're an IPA-ist, the transcription system with the largest lingual community?

[@noellelavenza494]

@@xiaolin867 if they're an IRA-ist, it would be a more revolutionary phonetic transcription system

[@sreynoldshaertle]

I'm impressed that you managed to engage with that response without even once mentioning how disrespectfully entitled and contentless it was.

[@SomeRandomDude821]

I really got a vibe that they pulled out a thesaurus and tried to come off as rude as possible.

[@itchaii4490]

Misali’s original comment was rude, it’s fair enough that they got a rude response back.

[@royal_zaffreknightx3445]

@@itchaii4490 Well, it certainly was harsh, but I do think the only word that gave his original comment a rude impression is just the ‘backwards’ at the end.

[@zakhawker344]

@@itchaii4490 Misali is very blunt when they don't like something. It's one thing to say something is the most poorly designed you've ever seen, it's another thing to respond with a huge ultra-pretentious Thesaurus-powered essay that includes personal insults.

[@ThePenisMan]

@@itchaii4490 his comment was much more harsh than rude, which when it comes to children’s education, yeah I’d hope it’d be Their response was not only rude but condescending and took his fair (and yes, cold and direct) criticism as a personal attack, and neglected to give an actual debate over their methods.

[@balrogdahomie]

6:36 I have never loved an instance of sarcasm more than this wall of text Every time someone says that English spelling is ridiculous im gonna be tempted to send this as a copypasta I won’t actually send it but I will be tempted

[@danieldavid3766]

Nah, I will actually send this exact wall of text whenever someone complains about English spelling.

[@Zekiraeth]

For your convenience: (ghoti voice) Did you know that you can pronounce "wueue" like "double u", and that that's completely consistent with English spelling? Ha ha ha, the English language is so arbitrary and irrational, a fact which is both true and unique to our language alone! I don't know anything about any other languages, so I assume that they're exactly like English but with different words, and that those words are more logical than our words, because those foreign cultures don't have nearly as much complicated history associated with their languages as we have for ours! Don't correct me if that's wrong, I refuse to update my understanding of the world for any reason. 😂

[@HectaSpyrit]

For a system which aims at being straightforward, intuitive, and natural for kids to learn English *spelling,* it seems to be solely focused on helping kids figure out how to *pronounce* words individually, without giving them any explanation for why they are spelled the way they are, and why one spelling is pronounced a certain way, which would be an actual explanation of spelling instead of pronunciation. In place of actual explanations, PCUES give wishy-washy, hand-wavy excuses and mnemonic devices to convey a word's pronunciation, which are at best incorrect, awkward, inconsistent, and approximative, and at worse blatantly wrong and misleading. Mnemonics are a completely fine way to memorise pronunciation, but the way PCUES does it, and the way I see it, it's exactly this: memorising, not learning. I think it's really no better than memorising the individual pronunciations of words without having any pattern to rely on, because the ones that PCUES attempts to give simply don't line up with the actual patterns of English spelling and thus inevitably fail in many cases. This is, again, brushing by the fact that PCUES supposedly wants to help children *understand spelling* rather than to *indicate pronunciation* to them, or am I wrong on this? Also, despite wanting to be the most approachable and intuitive and clear as possible for children, the distinction between "combined" and "blended" letter groups seems to me so obtuse, confused, fuzzy, and something that just makes sense in the heads of the makers of PCUES, that I really can't imagine how a children is supposed to understand this distinction and use it to figure out naturally how a word is sounded. Not only that, but if I brush this off and decide to take PCUES's explanation of these two concepts at face value, that is "Combined" = the letter group is actually pronounced as a single sound, and "Blended" = all the individual letters are sounded and "sound like themselves" (how can a letter not sound like itself?), then this distinction is still sometimes completely wrong. For example, the way they transcribe the word "thing" (4:36): "ing" is marked as a blended letter group, which suggests that the "i", "n" and "g" are all individually pronounced and "sound like themselves" (in quotes because this is clearly ambiguous), and so would be pronounced "thi n g" where "n" is sounded like in "no" and the "g" is a hard G. I somehow doubt that this is how people actually pronounce this word, and that this is what we should tell kids it is pronounced. You most certainly say it "thiŋ" where the "ng" is actually pronounced as a single nasal sound. This is of course assuming that "the letters sound like themselves" mean that the letters are given their usual sounding, and are not pronounced like their names, so "g" would sound like a hard G and not like "djee". However, because PCUES seems to insist so much on pronouncing letters like their names as a way to convey pronunciation more naturally, one would be absolutely justified in interpreting this phrase as meaning "the letters sound like their names". In that case, "thing" would sound like "thiendjee" if I am to take PCUES's transcription at its word. I don't need to explain why this is still not how "thing" is actually pronounced? And what of the "th" in "thing"? PCUES marks it as a combined group, which is fair enough, but if combined groups are actually pronounced as one sounds which has supposedly nothing to do with its constituent letters, according to the explanation given (which is not always true in reality), then how is it actually pronounced? PCUES only tells the child reader that it's not pronounced how they think it is, but doesn't tell them how it is really pronounced at all. What good is that? Jan's idea of annotating the word with ruby characters above these letter groups to actually give their pronunciation is so much more useful, effective, and simple than this convoluted concept that doesn't actually tell you anything about how these groups are pronounced. Finally, the awful and just all-over-the-place look of PCUES is, I think, actively hurting its capacity to be a learning tool for children. Bold letters look way to similar to widened letters, the vertical position of a letter seems to mean something different depending on the letter, the use of colour to mark silent letters is a good idea for children but grey is way to close to white for that contrast to be useful I feel. But most importantly, whenever I read PCUES, my eyes are doing some serious summer saults and gymnastics simply to read the transcriptions in a single go without tripping all over the letters, because the characters keep jumping up and down, changing size, colour and orientation. I'm deploying such a massive mental effort just to parse them that I don't have any mental resources left to actually try and decode the meaning of the transcriptions. Given that children pick up on visual cues so strongly, I really think this "ransom note"-looking cacophony, as you so accurately described, is unnecessary and excessive noise that just obscure the disappointingly simple signal. It's really more convoluted than it needs to be. Ruby annotations would accomplish the same thing a lot better and a lot more clearly. The aesthetic *is* important in my opinion, and PCUES looks so god awful that I think it actually makes it harder to understand than the untranscribed English word. PS: I mean no attack on the makers of PCUES. I know that it's very hard to make a transcription system that both works and is accurate, and is appropriate for children to learn with. It mixes two disciplines that are very challenging in their own ways, and even harder to compose together, and I commend the people behind PCUES for trying to accomplish this feat. In no way do I mean to imply that I could do a better job. That said, their response to Jan's comment really bugs me. It seems like a "You are too narrow minded and stuck in your biases and pre-existing framework to understand and accept our superior system. If you were so inclined to see things our way, *then* we would be glad to discuss with you." I'm sorry, but if you aren't interested in discussing with someone unless they already agree with you, then you aren't interesting in discussing anything at all. Their claim that "the question answers itself" also seems like a cop out from giving an actual justification for why PCUES is effective and good like they claim it is, instead saying that saying it's good is a tautology, or so obvious it doesn't need explaining. I get that they are probably proud of what they are doing, and that they really thing PCUES can be a good learning tool for children, but that's just a bizzare response.

[@connorconnor1631]

_holy-_ hÜly

[@andrewpinedo1883]

You get a free like and reply just for writing that down.

[@HectaSpyrit]

@@andrewpinedo1883 Haha I appreciate it!

[@dustykh]

"We welcome dialogue, but your dialogue shows how BIASED you are." Any kind of credibility I thought they had for making a system that's more intuitive to kids just went out the window. They just answered a question with a very condescending "no u" and tried to gaslight you into believe that you were wrong all along. I learned reading just fine without *bold* letters and a drunken aesthetic.

[@DragonWinter36]

Clearly, they meant based

[@Nukestarmaster]

Honestly, as soon as I heard that, I knew it was going to be bad, but the immediate descent into incoherent psychobabble just filled me with loathing.

[@MrCrashDavi]

I hate the way the word biased has become a pejorative.

[@DragonWinter36]

@@MrCrashDavi so do I, but such is the world we live in

[@binarypench]

there you go, blabbering on about languages again. don't you know how crazy you sound?

[@Hyreia]

Honestly, the English furigana idea is both the simplest and best idea here but I'm biased. There's lots of times I've read a word and never heard it and when I go to say it aloud for the first time I say it wrong. If books intended for people still learning to read English did this (and you could teens it's not insulting or whatever) did this and there were plugins for common web browsers, that would be great.

[@Daehpo]

Yeah, why reinvent the wheel when there is already a solution? Piggybacking off of preexisting systems seems like the best way to go about teaching kids. Especially with how it's hammered into them to "sound things out". I do kind of wonder if perhaps kids would start spelling words with the furigana instead; like "colonel" and "hiccough" as "cernel" and "hiccup" instead. (I'm not against the idea, as I for one welcome spelling changes like "through" → "thru" and "though" → "tho")

[@John_Weiss]

@@Daehpo I might use “kernul” instead of 'cernel', because the latter could be mispronounced as “sernel.” Everything else tho? _Agreed_ … drop all of the silent consonants as long as doing so doesn't introduce ambiguity.

[@AnaseSkyrider]

@@Daehpo [EDIT: Original comment was too unrelated, I made it its own comment, so here's something actually relevant] I have to wonder just how deep down the rabbit hole such respellings could become. The obvious examples from Jan's prior video, like 'through -> thru', make a fair amount of sense, but what about words like "sense"? There's no long vowels so the last 'e' is silent and yet doesn't modify the pronunciation. How would a furigana style represent this word, and could it end up changing its spelling? Honestly, looking at a complete version of this system in and of itself seems like a fun rabbit hole.

[@killerbee.13]

@@AnaseSkyrider The E does change the pronunciation of "sense", I think, if you compare it to "lens" where the S is voiced

[@bobboberson8297]

One of the bonuses of adopting furigana is authors can do a lot of interesting stuff with it. For example, writing a synonym of a rare word above it as furigana so that the author can still use a hyperspecific word or saying or reference that they want to use without confusing the audience. It's like how some authors use footnotes to explain things. You see these kinds of things in manga very often, even in stuff not aimed at kids, in part because manga have serialized releases so readers won't remember something mentioned even just a little bit earlier in the story (because that might have been weeks ago).

[@pikgears]

"specifically meant for an American dialect of English with a cot-caught merger and the Mary-marry-merry merger, but not the pin-pen merger or the pour-poor merger" works for _me_ , so it's clearly flawless, no more questions.

[@traumatizedamericanrat]

I have all the mergers in this comment

[@pikgears]

@@traumatizedamericanrat sorry, pcues says you're wrong

[@traumatizedamericanrat]

@@pikgears Oh naurrrrr

[@670839245]

I learned English as a foreign language. The *only* instance of hearing "this letter is pronounced in the word as the letter's name itself" from any English teacher or other learning resource is, when there is a silent "e" at the end of a word, the vowel before it is pronounced like the letter's name, eg the "a" in cake, the "i" in bite.

[@fractalez]

I was reading comments before watching the video and I was confused why there's no "e" in word "spelling" (in my native language the name of the letter "e" is pronounced "eh"), and later on I realized they meant the sound "ee". I can see childrens making a similar mistake I think, childrens learn with the song that "A" is called "Aye", so teacher try to simply things from there. And now PCUES are simplying from a simplification In general, the hard part of teaching is that simplying is easier, sometimes the best option, but by definition, wrong information that might affect them in the long run But saying "E" letter is called "Ee", and pronounced "Ee", "eh", "ə" randomly is also a simplification. At least I started to seeing patterns. Because even in words like "though, tough, caught, thought, through, enough, throughout, thorough, bought" there's some patterns. Or I just straightforward memorized things like "hiccough" from hearing them a lot. Island is actually "Iland", got ya But I gotta admit I already knew IPA and it's not the same things as learning your first language. I'm not a teacher neither

[@cheep5645]

@@fractalez I’m a native speaker and it took until seeing this comment to realizing what they meant with the ‘spelling’ stuff 🤦‍♀️

[@3u-n3ma_r1-c0]

@@cheep5645 SAME I DIDNT KNOW *THATS* WHAT THEY MEANT. HE DID NOT. OH MY GOD.

[@ByzantineDarkwraith]

@@3u-n3ma_r1-c0 no, that’s not what they meant. They didn’t just mean there’s no “ee” sound (no E saying it’s name), they actually meant there’s no “eh” sound in spelling, just an “L” (saying it’s name). It’s absolutely ludicrous. Why do they say how the association between written letters and their letter names trips a lot of learners up… and then proceed to *try to strengthen that association in every possible way* … WHYYY

[@wheedler]

@@thomaswinwood I'm a native speaker from England and I don't think we were ever taught about long and short vowels, because even now I don't really know what people mean when they're mentioned. I think we were taught using OP's method, where a silent E makes the preceding vowel sound like the name of the letter.

[@alansmithee419]

11:35 "If you've now decided you agree with us we'd be welcome to hear any criticism you have." Good job.

[@Autumn-Muse]

Why does this feel like a villain monologue?

[@saiphrivas1437]

Oh dear merciful god the moment they described the system i knew this was gonna be about pcues we're in for a fucking ride

[@ventriloquistmagician4735]

i laughed out loud at THIS

[@saiphrivas1437]

WHY DOES THIS HAVE SO MANY LIKES??????

[@jayIG]

amateur i knew this was gonna be about pcues from the thumbnail

[@milk6982]

Can't believe they named a learning system to be used by kids "pee queues" Very funny

[@timothymclean]

By which you mean "p.. q....s".

[@shuiichii5517]

I'm no expert at educating, but one thing I have learned while studying is that making things easier to learn isn't necessarily the best. If you learn something the "easy" way it tends to effect how you view everything. All the reasons its bad linguistically are the same reasons its bad from educational stand point as well. Its not helping anyone to read, it's helping learn how to use PCUES. How is one supposed to use pcues when it's not written in that way? What tools does a child have when learning in this style? These should be the first questions asked if it was to help literacy in children grow.

[@Bootleg_Jones]

I completely agree with this. Young children are better able to unlearn misconceptions than adults, and often teaching the method of reaching an answer is more effective than just teaching the answers. You're sabotaging a child by teaching them a bad methodology just because it reaches some right answers easier, especially if you don't correct that methodology before they become hardwired for it.

[@AnaseSkyrider]

According to my uncle, my older sister learned to read the FCAT way, which was apparently skimming sentences and paragraphs to look for key words and details, and according to him, this resulted in her crippled ability to read sentences in a way that allows her to process nuance and actually notice what the key details of a sentence actually are.

[@ferociousfeind8538]

yeah, taking easy logical shortcuts instead of the more complex reality now will only lead to dealing with that complexity later on, leaving a time when you thought you knew how it worked, but actually didn't. I know jan misali doesn't want a piano dropped on him, but that piano is coming down eventually, we have to choose when to drop it, and I'd prefer dropping it sooner rather than later, you know?

[@Nukestarmaster]

@@ferociousfeind8538 It's essentially the orthography equivalent of that common core mathematics a bunch of busybodies foisted on the US school system a couple years back.

[@WolfgangDoW]

Teaching people the wrong method, even if simpler causes far more harm, cos they have to UNlearn it later Think the biggest problem is over reliance on ABCs "letter names" My niece is 5 and I was even helping her with a game on her tablet that teaches spelling Her parents have always used the "lower case" names for letters, spelling words out separately. And I helped her today cos she was mixing up "wing" and "ring" (tricky as w/r are similar sounds too). And I made a "w" with my hands and explained it looks like a bird flying a bit. ((This will also come in handy for shadow puppets :P ))

[@Liggliluff]

(10:25) The way the response is written, and the way it's read out, it's like a villain belittling the hero.

[@lyrablack8621]

"In general everything just kinda looks like a ransom note" xDDDDDD

[@xiaolin867]

(11:23) "Do you hear the e in spelling? Do you hear the second I in spelling? No." Uh... the IPA disagrees. /ˈspɛlɪŋ/

[@simplycinema4d975]

Even though I dont agree with what these pepole are saying, the fact that in IPA the character p represents the sound /p/ doesn't mean that that is the case for every language, the same with "queue", even if in IPA it is /kju:/, that doesn't mean that the q, u, e and u are silent, their spelling just doesn't look similar to the IPA of the word

[@xiaolin867]

@@simplycinema4d975 It's especially bad with names. The PCUES (I already forgot the name, darnit) system doesn't really care about a word it doesn't know and instead it just approximates what it sounds like. The point of the system is to teach kids how to pronounce things and it literally messes up with stuff like this! Not very useful for learning, huh. (I believe in IPA supremacy)

[@simplycinema4d975]

@@xiaolin867 I agree, your first statement is just very misguided

[@xiaolin867]

@@simplycinema4d975 Ah, could you please tell me what's wrong with it

[@mrpedrobraga]

@@xiaolin867 The sound in "spelling" is the Spanish E sound as in *E*levator and tEd talk not the English E, as in p*EE* and t*E*a which, for some reason, is the NAME of the letter...

[@ThomasTheThermonuclearBomb]

10:06 I love toki pona. Learning Activist just said “Thanks, Person”

[@KunaiSapper]

This is actually an extremely useful conclusion for people who teach English in Japan like JET teachers, as teaching English with its equivalent of furigana would be a familiar tool and hopefully improve struggling student pronounciation.

[@TyroneSama]

the way you use on-screen text in your videos is cool-the ability to basically "footnote" a voiceover, providing a bunch of extra detail or precision without interrupting the flow of thought, is an advantage of video that i almost never see. thanks for doing what you do :0

[@jordanhayes1064]

The way their response was worded, how they were talking about 'progress', basically trying to insult you by saying "bias in thinking caused by your static conception of the orthography", and how they worded the end with making any response other than silence implying that you agree with them reminds me of professor Umbridge from Harry Potter

[@sjajsjsja4523]

They're clearly not native speakers, which makes me wonder why anyone would care what they have to say about teaching English to children in the first place.

[@feliciabarker9210]

It took me a long time to even understand what the problem being described was because it was such an utterly bananas way of doing it. Also, their response seems to be that kids develop letter sound recognition before pronunciation rules, so rather than help them unlearn the mistake, we'll just entrench it but it's fine as long as you assume that going forward they will ALWAYS be using PCUES.

[@PlatinumAltaria]

Proposition: Children get confused between the sounds letters represent and their names. Sensible solution: We should change the names of the letters to be more like their typical sounds. Insane solution: We should spell words like woRdz.

[@Salsmachev]

The funny thing: we mostly already do pronounce letters the way they sound, we just add a vowel sound to make them legible/pronounceable English syllables. Like, yeah we could standardise them a bit more so you have all consonants as CV syllables with the same vowel for all of them, but I'm not sure there's really a significant problem there to be solved.

[@PlatinumAltaria]

@@Salsmachev A, E, I, O, U, W and Y are all bad. They should be "aa", "air", "ee", "ore", "oo", "why" and "yed". For the sake of the alphabet song another "and" should be placed between W and X (why and eks, yed and zed/zee). C and G use their less common values, at the very least G should be "ghee". Q should be "kwee". R is pronounced without an /r/ in non-rhotic dialects, it should be "rar". Oh yeah and H-dropping dialects should say "then" or "and" instead of "aitch" at the start of the second line.

[@Vikezor]

@@PlatinumAltaria so basically A, I and O should be called AA EE OO

[@LordZarano]

@@PlatinumAltaria ah, eh, ih, oh, uh, wh, yh

[@SylviusTheMad]

If we just adapted the German alphabet, many of these problems would go away.

[@tortoise-chan]

as a cognitive science major, the way they consistently use a couple of handwavy principles like "wire and fire" as a justification is just painful. Like, wouldn't it have sufficed to say that they build an association between things that frequently occur together? Why feel the need to bring in jargon that doesn't actually add anything extra

[@John_Weiss]

Also, don't our brains work best by recognizing patterns? The "left"-"lept"--"slept" example is one such pattern. I'm sure we could both come up with several others if we put our minds to it. I have to wonder just his much actual linguistic and neuroscience research their work is actually based on …

[@jackneubecker]

It's in crank-ology 101. Makes you sound more educated.

[@AnaseSkyrider]

@@jackneubecker It's extremely common for pseudoscience to use jargon borrowed from other disciplines in order to *appear* as though what is being described is more scientific, when all they're really doing is using analogies (such as "metastatic" to describe a "quick spread" in a discourse that has nothing to do with cancer).

[@Nukestarmaster]

@@AnaseSkyrider Yep, incoherent technobable/psychobabble is a massive warning sign of quackery/pseudoscience.

[@scptime1188]

@@John_Weiss Exactly! Having "left-lept-slept" be an established pattern ("consonant+e+constant cluster") is so much more intuitive than leveraging the edge cases where there is a cluster that happens to be pronounced as the name of a letter.

[@incorporealnuance]

fun fact: ruby text works in html, and isn't limited to east asian characters! less fun fact: almost every browser renders them inconsistently, and usually, very poorly, at least by the date I'm writing this

[@angeldude101]

I remember trying them out when I first discovered them and they worked fine from what I can tell. Not too surprised though that they're inconsistent. That's really just from how little they're used outside of Japan when they're really helpful in just about any language for both native speakers and older learners. Really we just need to make them more widely used so that browser developers would have a reason to did them.

[@Duiker36]

Everything angeldude101 said. All the major browser makers are fairly receptive to this kind of feedback and care quite a lot about it, and if it caught on with even some minor traction, that might be enough to get a W3C committee started.

[@nshade-fc6xl]

I remember learning phonics when I was very young and teachers used to say that in words like car the only letters that matter are c and r because the r eats the vowel right before it (the actual explanation I was given) and it is just the c sound followed by the r saying it's own name, and while I was like 6 or something I remember it not sitting right with me because it seemed like they were trying to say that the vowel just didn't matter that's what it sounds like when you have a vowel followed by r, for example burger --> burg-r. Of course this is not the case. take the words curd and card for example. Based on the rules that were presented we would say they are both pronounced /kärd/ or c_Rd. Which is simply false. Basically what I'm saying is an idea similar to PQs was presented to me when I was young (though after I had learned how to read) and even when I was young I could tell it was not quite right. Again I have no idea if I would have been able to actually come up with examples of why this was bad when I was 6 and I think I knew enough words at that point such that it didn't affect me. Also this idea was ONLY presented with respect to the letter r, not f or l or n or x or any letter.

[@LordZarano]

The real explanation is that the name of the letter R is "Ar" It's always annoyed me that english letters don't have nice names with well known spellings like the greek letters do Teaching kids that F's name is Ef instead of telling them incorrectly "F is pronounced ef" would be a lot more helpful I think

[@soaperon1]

I was always told f is pronounced fffffffffff

[@keepyourshoesathedoor]

@@LordZarano When I was young, we were told the name of the letter and the sound. So, F is /ef/ but sounds like ph. Same with q and k. The vowels would get me but everything else would be okay. There’s this website named starfall that teaches that way. (I haven’t gone on that recent)

[@Evilmon2]

Some teachers are really really bad at teaching phonics (because they also don't understand it). It's why the terrible cueing method of teaching literacy took off, because many teachers had a hard time teaching phonics because they didn't know what they were trying to teach.

[@jiffylou98]

I tried PCUES myself. After putting in “cute fraud” it kept sounding out “Yawn Me Silly”

[@lahagemo]

underrated comment

[@rgfella]

Wow, trying to figure out this comment sent me down an Anthony McCarthy rabbit hole XD

[@Sarsanoa]

@@rgfella you are now initiated. welcome to the inner circle.

[@jiffylou98]

@@rgfella one of us.

[@DragonWinter36]

@@rgfella one of us.

[@davidguthary8147]

PCUES: When learning the alphabet, kids associate letters with the sounds their names make. W: Am I a joke to you?

[@GODDAMNLETMEJOIN]

Final Fantasy 7: W is pronounced double

[@iantaakalla8180]

Japan in general: W is pronounced double

[@douglasbrouhard7024]

And then everything changed when the Great Vowel Shift attacked.

[@mollof7893]

Why is it called *"great* vowel shift" when it actualy fucking sucked? Hmmm........

[@sponge1234ify]

@@mollof7893 The "great" is in the Sarcastic Tone, [252].

[@keepyourshoesathedoor]

@@mollof7893 Great as in groundbreaking, huge, or significant. Just like the Great Dying or the Great Migration (both events not being good). Just like gross means large or whole. Gross income like overall. Crazy how that works.😰

[@mathpunkmindset7428]

I'm not an expert, so this is just some random internet opinion, but: if you were using "training wheels" of any kind to learn how to read, wouldn't you eventually have to learn how to read without them? I could still see something like PCUES being helpful, but I worry that the more complex the training wheels, the more time it takes (and the more confusing it is) to learn how to go without them. Using ruby characters in English seems like the best solution, because it's the simplest. It seems like that would be the easiest set of training wheels to learn to go without. My biggest issue with PCUES is that it looks like hell. I've seen quite a few people mention that this would be nearly impossible for dyslexic people to use, and I believe them. I think Learning Stewards deserves the benefit of the doubt, so I'll assume that accessibility is an issue they'll tackle eventually. But I don't think enough people say this: if your system for learning excludes ANY possible student, then your system is incomplete. Not inherently bad, mind. Just incomplete. Any good system of learning will consider the needs of all learners.

[@purpleisdebeste]

The idea is that once you learn a word you don’t forget. Whether this actually works is debatable.

[@thewanderingmistnull2451]

If your standard is that high, you will never have a good system, simply because it's impossible to incorporate every possible student.

[@mathpunkmindset7428]

@@thewanderingmistnull2451 I think that even if it isn't possible, a good educator will try. I've never met a teacher who was flippant about accommodating students who was good at teaching. Of course, there's a whole other conversation to be had about what little resources we give teachers to even try in the first place, or why we should expect teachers to be good when we give them long hours, little pay, and no respect. But coming back to this video a year later, in the particular case of PCUES... I don't see any reason to dump resources into a sort-of-okay tool that works some of the time, when even people with no expeirence are able to suggest better tools that work in more cases. I'm sure you're not trying to defend PCUES, but it's a good example of what I'm talking about when I say they aren't trying to include every learner.

[@jptoner]

“Do you hear the E on spelling” YES? YES I FUCKING DO?

[@shrinfinity5003]

For the bold letters stuff - Literally phonics. Just teach kids letter sounds along with the letter names instead of using some weird system which claims left has a silent e.

[@jackodonail1980]

The craziest part is that usually children DO learn the letter sounds alongside their names so PCUES is just creating unnecessary confusion.

[@Bootleg_Jones]

I think the most concerning part of Learning Stewards' response to your comment was the idea that, insted of trying to break a child's misconception that letters' names are all literally equivalent to the sounds they make (at least in some circumstances) which would make sounding out words easier for them in the future, they instead prefer to lean into those misconceptions in order to make things easy in the short term, likely during an a period where their target audience would most easily be able to break those misconceptions. I also feel like the stuff about how you don't *hear* the spelling of words (which I think you may have also misinterpreted slightly) is ignoring the fact that you don't *hear* any kind of spelling and all of it (letter names included) is "made up." There are plenty of words who's current commonly accepted English spelling is, at least at first glance, completely arbitrary to their pronunciations, so why not teach kids that fact (as well as how to work around it and recognize less common pronunciation rules) instead of trying to oversimplify?

[@ByzantineDarkwraith]

They literally acknowledge that the connection learners make between the letters and their letter names can trip them up when learning… So they decided to do *literally everything in their power to reinforce that connection*

[@DwarvenHydra]

I really appreciate your frequent references to fhqwhgads on this channel.

[@The_SOB_II]

come on... Fhqwhgads?

[@Salsmachev]

@@The_SOB_II Everybody to the limit

[@danieldavid3766]

As someone who’s never seen it’s origin, I now always associate it with jan Misali.

[@maxwchase]

Anecdotally, I don't remember ever being tempted to extend the "long" concept to consonants. That all sounds like something I'd find in a square four-panel comic on reddit with troll-faces. Or if I put in specific consonants like "long Q" or "long F", it sounds like "leveled up letters" from that tumblr post. Also, now I seem to be cursed to visualize how some common words are spelled in PCUES, and it's freaking me out. This is like the matrix if all of the green code were written in comic sans and wingdings. Although I let my guard down and wasn't ready for "again". ... They can't spell long U as long U because they need long U for the yod. This is so cursed.

[@maxwchase]

The more I think about this, the more I'm like "I know I'm not qualified to teach spelling, but I'm sure that 'the t in tea rhymes with the e in brie' isn't the right direction".

[@zyaicob]

"The artificially complexly confusing relationships between letters and sounds" that's a bold condemnation coming from spLing

[@gamingtime9716]

The bold letters rule was nearly physically harmful

[@alexnoman1498]

I certainly figuratively vomited.

[@swaree]

I chuckled at that tilted r

[@bohdanpyzh2712]

@@swaree tilted r is at least kind of intuitive, it's like regular "r", but it's a bit, er, off

[@gormster]

@@bohdanpyzh2712 as a non rhotic speaker I genuinely have no idea what the tilted r is about

[@IONATVS]

@@gormster In places where non-rhotic dialects would drop the “r”, in rhotic dialects, especially ones with the classic American sonorant “r”, we instead frequently emphasize the “r” specifically by moving it from the syllable coda to the syllable nucleus-where vowels are in most syllables-and make it into a diphthong with the preceding vowel. If the preceding vowel is a schwa or the speaker is speaking quickly/casually it can take over the nucleus ENTIRELY, leaving syllables with no vowel whatsoever, just a long, held out R holding a fake ID that says it’s totally vowel enough to run a syllable all by itself.

[@PandaTheLesser]

Loved the kanji/furigana talk at the end. Conceptually I like to compare all of the “you just have to memorize it” words in English with kanji, but applying a furigana/spelling aid system to those English words is something I never considered yet makes so much sense.

[@murtaza6464]

When you learn to read Arabic (and Urdu somewhat), you have diacritic markings over letters showing which vowel to use after each consonant. These training wheels slowly come off as you enter adolescence. Kind of a similar approach to Annotated English/PCUES

[@CreatrixTiara]

In Malaysia I grew up learning both Jawi (a modified version of Arabic script used to write Malay) and the Qur'an (in Islamic Studies classes). The Qur'an had the diacritics but Jawi doesn't. I (and probably many others) associated diacritics in Arabic as "fancy formal Arabic" and Jawi's just too casual for that kind of thing.

[@joshwhite5730]

Yeah that’s how I learned Hebrew but since I live in America the training wheels have never came off

[@mercury3344]

2:05 me: man, jan Misali is really going in on not harassing people, which is good, but are they really afraid that their probably simple criticisms are going to- 2:50 *loses it*

[@mercury3344]

note it looks like a ransom note oh this is wild i want to know more about this now.

[@DragonWinter36]

I lost my shit there, too

[@driveasandwich6734]

That "you click on a word and it shows what Wiktionary says about it" idea at the start could work wonderfully as a Google Chrome add-on, right?

[@Salsmachev]

It looks like firefox actually has a wiktionary search add-on, but I was disappointed to find there isn't anything else :-/

[@feryth]

Chrome mobile has this functionality built-in

[@driveasandwich6734]

@@feryth Weird, I have Chrome Mobile and never heard of that

[@Duiker36]

Yes. The hard part is parsing, really.

[@feryth]

@@driveasandwich6734 apparently youtube ate my reply with the link to the google support page, so I'll just tell you the feature is called Touch to Search.

[@cloud_and_proud]

??? What're they saying??? You absolutely hear the E in spelling, it's just that the letter name for L has an E sound in it, and they're attributing it to that

[@seanthesheep]

Hmm, perhaps they meant E's name because there isn't an "ee" /i/ sound in "spelling"

[@feralcatgirl]

@@seanthesheep that can't be it. after all their own software links unmarked e with /ε/

[@jiffylou98]

You don’t hear the U in “bullshit” do you?

[@DragonWinter36]

@@jiffylou98 byoullshit? no, but i don’t believe that’s relevant

[@pXnTilde]

bUt ItS tOo CoNfUsInG fOr ChIlDrEn!

[@EvanG529]

10:17 "Jan is nitpicking and biased, I win bye bye."

[@pepkin88]

I think children are smart enough, that if you teach them "this is the letter ES for Sun", they would figure out that the letter S stands for the sound S, not ES, and that ES is just a name. If not, Double-U is a bigger clue. I can't speak from experience, as my native language is Polish, which has a very phonetic writing. Also I was learning reading before school, and definitely before anyone introduced me to an equivalent of the ABC song. It was more straightforward, I saw a word and heard how it sounded so I associated the sounds to the shapes. Funny thing, I remember that sometimes I made mistakes regarding the direction of reading. Notably, the bus number 85 i read out loud as 58, and a painkiller medicine named Apap I read as "Pa pa" (bye bye).

[@kirang1854]

This is one of the few times I feel like a creator has really emphasized that they didn’t want to attack anyone and respected the source material. Love the passion

[@cool_scatter]

The "long consonants" thing has me headspun. Learning that "left" is pronounced with an L sound, a long F sound, and a T sound is not only objectively incorrect, but actively stymies the learning of the actual sounds of letters in words (which - like it or not - is a necessary part of learning to read). Now I'm irrationally angry at these three people.

[@tecwynjones6532]

15:12 Yeah that's the problem I have with it: it's very region specific. Let's say a teacher from Wales hears of this tool and wants to teach their pupils from this; as Jan here said, "tomato is pronounced like that to me and no bother checking it" is just the tip here. Welsh students have a chance of knowing Welsh as their first language and their parents might try to teach them their abc's in Welsh: this then makes it very easy to read a letter into a word. Let's take "spelling": when reading this in a Welsh way that /e/ is extremely obvious as we use the [ɛ] for that letter only, so yes, we do read the /e/ here. Actually, in its normal pronounciation in English, it's very similar to Welsh ([spɛɬiŋ]) so going out of the notate it like how they've done completely destroys the association that kids can have between words when learning more than one language at a time.

[@famitory]

it needs a symbol that just means "the spelling makes no sense because it's a loanword" and another that means "the spelling makes no sense because english has a lot of legacy content"

[@LiliththeMoth]

I genuinely loved this video, it takes something I've never heard of before and breaks it down in such a clear way that I completely understood your point and why PCUES fails in certain ways.

[@katara314]

I checked out their website (Don't worry I didn't contact them) and they seem weirdly hostile in general just like they were in their response to you. One example is "English orthography is the result of elitism, prejudice, ignorance, negligence, and a series of historical accidents." I'll allow the fact that there was a bit of elitism and ignorance involved, but it was really mostly just sound change.

[@igakierczak3471]

"Do you hear the "e" in "spelling"?" Me, whose mother language pronounces the letter "e" as "eh" (like in "spelling"): Well, yes!

[@Flowtail]

I feel so cool being able to recognize the opening theme song as a Heaven Rhythm Fever remix

[@jiffylou98]

Umm actually it’s an Anthony McCarthy remix excuse you

[@blunderbus2695]

It's not even really a remix, it's just the minigame select music after clearing remix 7

[@felipevasconcelos6736]

15:26 I’ve been learning English for well over half of my life, and it took me this long to learn that the verb and the noun are pronounced differently.

[@Catmomila]

same, there are many words like that in english. It's a bit of a mess.

[@ookazi1000]

I'mma be real with you; there are some native english speakers that don't know that either. And don't even get me started on the fuckers like me who just pronounce (prəʊ •nʌns) word however the fuck we want, convention be damn'd.

[@jiffylou98]

Were you contented?

[@TZerot0]

As a typographer and type designer I can say with whatever authority 7 years in design school give me, that aesthetics of text do matter in terms of legibility and readability, and something that ugly is hindering itself in more ways than one. On a base level, something that is ugly and awkward isn't going to attract any users...

[@lucasfarted]

Super interesting video! I'm studying Japanese at the moment and furigana is super useful. I could definitely use it in English as I find I regularly find words I don't know how to pronounce. Similar to English, I know how to say so much more than I confidently know how to read and the biggest breakthrough learning moments for me in Japanese is when I realise a word I'd never recognised was a word I'd been saying regularly. And furigana facilitates this!

[@thelollykitty]

6:00 and "long O" woud technically be /uː/ in modern english, remnants are seen in the words do, to, move and prove /ow/ comes from ME /ɔː/ which came from /ɑː/ and thus was spelt as until the normans decided that it sounded more like an o sound and changed the spelling to however sometimes it was spelt as which is how we get words like float (ME: floten)

[@nicksteele5613]

One of the first problems I noticed was their use of bold letters to show how they're pronounced. Someone with something like dyslexia or ADHD, even a kid who doesn't know they need glasses, it could be difficult to differentiate those letters. Hearing the pronunciation will compensate of course, but the rule might be difficult to navigate.

[@JivanPal]

How have I not seen any comments praising that _amazing_ intro sequence at 2:55?!

[@lifthras11r]

Especially amazing once you realize that the ransom note title _is_ the actual transcription!

[@MissPoplarLeaf]

I wonder if this is gonna be like when Tantacrul critiqued MuseScore... and then got hired by them to lead their redesign

[@DannyDog27]

Nah, the impression I get from the team behind PCUES is really pretentious and condescending. MuseScore’s team, on the other hand, has a history of taking feedback very positively. Even in Tanty’s original video, he brought up how nicely the team took some of his critiques

[@Nukestarmaster]

@@DannyDog27 When the team replies with "yoo're just biased", "dO yOu HeAr A 'e' In SpElLiNg" and psychobabble ... Yeah, there's no way in hell these people are ever going to let an outsider mess with their _"perfect"_ orthography.

[@eviemaybe]

i don't think misali is gonna add telemetry to PCUES

[@WolfgangDoW]

8:37 "old-timey" here meaning "British" British English retains -t and -ed forms of many verbs, usually to do with transitivity or other subtle differences Ps the system you showed at the beginning was so much better and should be expanded into a full system - signed, a dyslexic

[@tux1468]

10:05 > Thanks Jan *disappointed hank from breaking bad face*

[@jiffylou98]

Ya missed somethin there ma’am

[@rsyvbh]

"thanks person" Yeah i noticed too lol

[@nova-witchwood]

guess who doesn’t know toki pona level 1!

[@ts4gv]

21:06 the subtle, gradual change in tone from this moment to the end of the video you only realize how sharp & sudden that change is after the sentence ends kind of a surreal moment

[@OptimusPhillip]

The "bocce" example makes no sense to me. "cc" is consistently pronounced as "ch" in Italian loan words. It's not an edge case, you can just create a conjoined "cc" symbol to represent this.

[@phaneros]

I think @OptimusPhilip 's proposal sounds absolutely gucci.

[@EnigmaticLucas]

Italian loanwords aren’t numerous enough for it to not be an edgecase

[@maciejlehr4874]

Wanna name some? Just asking bc curious

[@OptimusPhillip]

@@maciejlehr4874 Cappuccino and fettuccine are the first examples that I can think of. In hindsight, they probably aren't as numerous as I thought, but it's still established in my mind as just a thing some words do, so I feel giving it a generalized expression is valid

[@killerbee.13]

@@OptimusPhillip Perhaps a more convincing argument that it's not an edge case and should just be treated as a joined "cc" is that there are really only a few sounds "cc" can make, and none of the others can really be said to be "cc" joined together as opposed to just "c + c". For instance, "accent" doesn't require you to consider them as "joined", "ac·cent" is how you actually read that word. In "Morocco" you can just make one silent. In "Pinocchio" you can make the "ch" silent. (These words are just randomly chosen by scanning through a list of words that contain 'cc'.)

[@g.d.8065]

I kind of feel like a more fundamental problem (even outside the context of this system) is letters being taught in isolation rather than in context, with the chance of giving the idea that they're literally pronounced like their names. It kind of feels like teaching engineering by showing you individual gears and bearings and waiting until a good while later to actually show any mechanisms that make use of them in tandem and demonstrate what they actually do. (Which is kind of how math is taught, come to think of it.)

[@maciejlehr4874]

I hope there are people who teach the "silent" E's effect on spatially disconnected, preceeding vowels.

[@LordZarano]

@@maciejlehr4874 Yup, I was taught the vowel-consonant-vowel rule at school (England)

[@maciejlehr4874]

@@LordZarano I was not in Germany. Every bit of English orthography was treated like it had not a single rule. Sucks good on u and the folk tho

[@Duiker36]

I have so many issues with how math is taught.

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

The difference is that the gears of math function on their own without combining them. English spelling does not work at all if you look at letters individually. Like the rule that the default "short" vowel sound becomes a "long" vowel sound when a vowel is placed two letters after it. e.g: dim / dime latter / later If children always think in terms of the names of letters, that's something they need to unlearn, not something we should be reinforcing.

[@Salsmachev]

Coming back to this, I've realised that PCUES doesn't even manage to avoid the thing it's trying to avoid by insisting you can't hear the e in spelling. The claim is that kids struggle with learning the difference between letter names and letter sounds, and that this can be resolved by using letter names instead of letter sounds. But the system still requires students to learn letter sounds too. Take the word spelling again. In PCUES you still have to know the sounds of s and p. You have to learn everything PCUES tries to avoid as too hard, plus a bunch of extra stuff. The word "hi" goes from having three likely pronunciations (hai, hee, hih) to having at least six (aichai, aichee, aichih, hai, hee, hih) and the problem only gets worse the longer the word becomes. Assuming a letter can only be pronounced as its name or its most common sound (a simplification which benefits PCUES) then an n-letter word will have 2^n possible pronunciations.

[@loekwiebes1075]

As a linguist, PCUES is an unscientific and dumb take, because it completely disregards how phonemes work. But, their entire method is convoluted: they notice that there is a discrepancy between how we teach the alphabet and written/spoken language, which is a valid concern! I do believe that children struggle with that. However, taking that discrepancy and concluding that the entire orthography should be changed is way more work than the other solution: changing how we teach children the alphabet. Or maybe disambiguating the alphabet (elements in written language) from the phoneme inventory (elements in spoken language) completely, and teaching children more intuitions about this difference.

[@faqihawang236]

Alright, but could we play Hangman with this?

[@mbdg6810]

😂😂

[@IONATVS]

only if you are filled with self-loathing

[@Salsmachev]

Bold f? *draws head* Subscript f? *draws body* Superscript f? *draws leg* Grey f? *draws other leg* Tilted f? *draws arm* Upside down f? *draws other arm* Backwards magenta f? *draws nose* ..... Infinitely recursive nested fractal f? "Hey you got one! Now just wait an eternity while I fill in all the infinitely recursive nested fractal fs!"

[@Some_Awe]

12:00 reading and pronounciation are often taught at the same time, we cut words up in how you say it and where to enunciate, this helps visualize spoken segments into letter combinations, this orhography has no room for that at all, in rare occasions like pO tA tO it works but rarely is it intuitive, they just found a quirky way to incorporate how the alphabet is taught and adding research to reaffirm their bias that its good to teach

[@fy-]

Anecdotally, I had a incredibly hard time teaching my 6 year old sister Pinyin, exactly because she couldn't grasp that the consonant letters are not pronounced as their name. In Pinyin each consonant letter's name is pronounced with the consonant sound followed by a vowel sound. When constructing a syllable, my sister just couldn't extract the consonant sound from the consonant letter's name to combine with another vowel.

[@Sarsanoa]

doesn't help that the vowels are context sensitive too. i and u after sh sounds totally different from i and u after x. uo is written as o after bpmf which coincidentally have consonant names that sound like they end in the uo sound.

[@Sarsanoa]

@@romaios1609 The systems are similar, and share some flaws. Both are perfectly serviceable as a pronounciation aid for dictionary use and for spelling input, which is their main goal. Pinyin/zhuyin is not so dissimilar in concept to kunrei-shiki romanization vs hiragana in Japanese, although most native Chinese speakers will likely only know one or the other, for (I guess) geopolitical reasons.

[@evelynminer8568]

@@romaios1609 I do want to defend Pinyin a bit here, because the idea that you need to be "completely familiar" with Chinese Phonology to accurately parse it is very strange to me. The system is very good at approximating Chinese pronunciations within an Englishy phonology (e.g. approximating the aspiration distinction with a voicedness one) once you learn how it uses a few outlying letters like q and c. And even then, as a native English speaker you only need like 3-5 additional rules/explanations to derive an accurate Chinese pronounciation (voicedness, retroflex consonants, silent w, certain vowel clusters being shortened, the rhotic)

[@KingOfCheesee]

In Germany, first graders learn the ABC not as the letter names, but as the sound they make. So for example L (which is also called "eL" in German) is taught to them as "LLLL", same for most other consonants. In my opinion this is much less confusing as teaching them "eL" and then going for a trainwreck "spLing". They only get taught the letter names after they can already read. After all the names aren't actually needed for that. Though to be fair, pronounciation is usually a lot more consistant in German; especially vowels only really make one sound. Anyway, this is probably going to be buried below all the other good comments, but hey

[@DarkHumors]

Looking at this, teaching IPA notation to kids seems way more concise.

[@fish.enjoyer]

"Or if you're me, you copy-paste it into the wictionary search bar" Oh my gosh, I do that

[@LordZarano]

"!wikt ctrl-v" into my default search engine in a new tab (DuckDuckGo) for me. Although !wt also works apparently, so I guess I'll use that now.

[@ElrealMariopwns]

similar to the system with Japanese, Arabic has the diacritics that indicate the short vowel sounds that are important to discern meaning from their root based vocabulary. You see them used in nearly every word in children's books and as the reading level increases it becomes clear from the context how a word is voweled and diacritics are only needed for cases of ambiguity. I think it would be really interesting and useful if there was an easy way to implement something similar in English that would be simple enough to teach children but could still be used in writing intended for adults that use less frequent words, I was having this thought and typing this comment before you got the part where you talked about Japanese but I still wanted to post it :)

[@AlienValkyrie]

So hold on. Where I went to school in Germany, we learned the letter _sounds_ before the letter names - I mean, we probably had the ABC song, but our teachers in school made an effort to teach us the sounds, rather than the letter names, and we generally started with the letters with a simple pronunciation that is basically always the same (those exist in German). So for instance, insdead of learning "ef", "ge" or "ha", we basically learned /f/, /gə/ and /hə/. More irregular letters didn't show up on their own at all in the beginning - we learned about qu, ck, ch and sch, rather than q and c alone. Do people not do that in America? I mean, I realize it's more difficult in English for plenty of letters, including all the vowels as well as certain consonants (like c, g or s), and there's a lot more irregularity with silent letters - but couldn't you still just do that for letters like bdfklmnprvw?

[@maciejlehr4874]

Very good comment! Summarised my own initial reaction yet also added some good points I couldn't think of.

[@darksidecola4529]

We learn to sing the alphabet very early on, usually before learning the sounds the letters make, but pretty soon after children are taught the sounds the letters make my showing a common word that starts with that letter. So like, a kid will learn to sing their ABCs, and then they'll be taught "a is for alligator, b is for banana, ect ect"

[@jamgin9890]

yeah i was very surprised when in german class we learned the 'german alphabet' and it was so much easier because its just.. the sounds that the letters make. very different from the alphabet letters that confused me as a kid.

[@Gallopstar]

yes, I thought that too. At school we learnt how to spell words phonetically, and that still seems to be the most popular method given one of my relatives was spelling words out loud phonetically as she wrote. I think everyone learns the alphabet before that but it isn't really used in learning to spell until later.

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

I guess you mean "USA" instead of "America" but in Canada I did indeed learn the sounds of the letters, not just the names of the letters. We learned that ABC song (ending with "zed", not "zee"), but I think we understood that it was just the names of the letters, not their sounds. When sounding things out we used just the basic consonant sounds: B: "buh" C: "kuh" D: "duh" etc.

[@LunaAlphaKretin]

Oh hell yes, ruby text is a wonder I'd love to see English take advantage of. One of my favourite things you can do with it from a creative perspective is "forced reading", where you use a bunch of kanji for their logographic meanings even if it wouldn't necessarily make a coherent word, then use furigana to supply an arbitrary pronunciation, effectively giving something multiple names worth of meaning at once. Japanes Yu-Gi-Oh! cards do this a fair amount, for example.

[@chair547]

furigana-esque systems could help english in more ways than just hard to pronounce words. I think a furigana style pronounciation guide might be useful for writing foreign-language person names. Like if I want to write about a person named Zbigniew, the current options are "respell the name to fit english orthography", something like Zbigniyev, which is disrespectful because you're calling someone something that's not their name, or "don't do that", using the Polish orthography, which confuses readers. Using ruby characters, you could make the pronounciation clear while simultaneously calling people their actual names.