It's annoying, all right. What bugs me about it is that elementary-school kids seem to have enough trouble learning to spell as it is. Kids mimic what they see. I can remember a spelling test that I did quite badly on because I was using the British spellings of words. I didn't know that I could get marked wrong for putting down answers like "colour" instead of "color". I'd read several books that used the British spellings; therefore, both spellings were equally valid in my mind. I was really mad when I got my test score back, and it was hard for me to understand why I'd been wrong when, as far as I knew, I wasn't wrong. (Now, of course, I can agree that I was wrong, but only on this side of the Atlantic, and south of the Great Lakes. )

English is a confusing enough language (witness the constant mixing of "you're" and "your", or even "too", "two", and "to") without throwing in phonetic shorthand versions of words and cutesy deliberate misspellings. And since texting is considered "hip" and "young", kids are going to gravitate towards it already. I feel like an old fuddy-duddy sometimes, but I really do think that in public sources like television and newspapers, it's important to avoid misspellings. Languages shift with time and circumstance, and that's fine, but being able to spell correctly is important.

And again, I'm not including typos in my grumble. Those happen. Likewise, on a private board like this one, spelling honestly doesn't matter. It's a private board and we're all here to chat and have fun. And for folks who have English as a second language, again, spelling isn't that important: I'm just tickled to be able to talk to someone from a different culture and upbringing! It's only the young kids that I worry about : they need to be able to spell, and they don't need to be confused by having "official" sources using misspellings or text abbreviations.

I will agree that German has some interesting complexities. I guess growing up speaking English, I'm still confused as the the need for genders for all nouns... and German has three genders! The third one is for Katse...

Not to mention, in German you regularly come across 26+ letter words... ouch! The good thing though is that German is very phoentic. It's very difficult to mispronounce a word you read, as long as you know how the Germans pronounce their letters. No complications like the 'ough' sound in English (where through, though and thought all have different pronunciations).

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You're right, ladygalactor, Spanish is a real bear! I took three years of it in school and frankly can't speak it worth a darn. The verb tenses drove me straight up the wall. I don't know anything about German, but if it's as complicated as Spanish or worse, I doubt I'd be able to handle it.

That said, I still think English is something of a mess as languages go.

I have ever read in a survey somewhere that Russian language is the most difficult language to learn, followed by Chinese/ Japanese. They put Chinese/Japanese in the same position because Japanese language (especially Kanji characters) was actually derived from Chinese Characters.

Being a Chinese, I have to agree that Chinese is a very complex language, with more than 50,000 characters to learn (in fact, I am still learning new characters until now, , and what makes Chinese language even more complicated is that, each character can have 4 different intonations, that if a character is pronounced with wrong intonation, it can result in the sentence to have completely different meanings, that's how complicated Chinese language is,

I find that English is quite an easy language to learn, however, most of the people here at my place are very confused with English tenses, and of course, confusions with English words that are homophones, like "too","two" and "to", "know" and "no", etc.

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quote:

Originally posted by Barrdwing You're right, ladygalactor, Spanish is a real bear! I took three years of it in school and frankly can't speak it worth a darn. The verb tenses drove me straight up the wall. I don't know anything about German, but if it's as complicated as Spanish or worse, I doubt I'd be able to handle it. That said, I still think English is something of a mess as languages go.

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Don Quixote is the funniest book ever written.

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"If you think I am a Condor, you may keep that opinion;
Though I am no Condor, my Skylines rusty enough."

According to my significant other

Switzerland has four "official" languages - Italian, French, Romansch (same age as latin, but not related), and Switzer-deutsch. The last is similar to German, only spoken. If they want to communicate in "Swiss-German" they write in "High German"... and Romansch is also an unwritten language, with 20 or so dialects and only found in the little alpine valley villages. (Yes, he speaks all of these, plus English, and Italian - I get the Japanese and French and English combo.)

On the other hand - Indonesia presents challenges - wherein they are trying to standardize some 200 dialects over the island nation into one common use. And my father told us that Swahili was more difficult than Russian when he was required to take language training...

I suppose it all depends on what training you have in languages and how you learn them.

-Boeke

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-Boeke
Bird Scramble OE
155 issues - 36.5Years! - and flying high!

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Old age is a high price to pay for maturity.

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quote:

Originally posted by saturn quote: Originally posted by Reboekah On the other hand - Indonesia presents challenges - wherein they are trying to standardize some 200 dialects over the island nation into one common use. -Boeke Don't worry, Reboekah. I live in Indonesia, and Indonesian language, regardless of the various dialects, is undoubtedly one of the easiest language to learn in the world,I swear,

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-Boeke
Bird Scramble OE
155 issues - 36.5Years! - and flying high!