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The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.
Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.
But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.
This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.
[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:52AM (5 children)
That's minor quibbling, a native German may cringe if you mix them, but won't get confused.
And I think is well preferable to English, where the youngsters still engage in spelling bees close to the age of sexual maturity [bustle.com] (up to the age of 15). Fer God's sake, isn't anything better to do for the young minds than to ask them to rote learn how to spell their native language?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday August 11 2020, @09:45AM (3 children)
For that all you would have had to do is evolve the written language along with the changes in the spoken one. When you look back in the history of the English language, you'll notice that it was once actually closer to what is written. German has simply done that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:12AM (2 children)
A good part of the Anglosphere is yet to ditch the old imperial unit system and there's big resistance to that. Can you imagine the amount of resistance against changing the spelling? Will take many generations of rotten by rote brains until English gets a logical spelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by nostyle on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:01PM
The reform of spelling of English in America has actually been tried, most notably around 1906 with the "Simplified Spelling Board" spearheaded by Andrew Carnegie and endorsed by executive order of president Teddy Roosevelt (who used that spelling system for the remainder of his life). The effort did not succeed, although many government communications employed that system during Roosevelt's tenure.
Such undertakings fail to notice that there is a
perfectly / ˈpər-fik(t)-lē /
wonderful / ˈwən-dər-fəl /
system / ˈsi-stəm /
for denoting, phonetically, English words, which is nearly universally understood, and instantly accessible to web-enabled folk via online dictionaries.
So why don't we simply use that wonderful system? I suppose it is because some folk like me develop an odd affection for the warts in the spelling of English. (exa: I thought I brought enough dough to get through to tomorrow.) One gets used to it and learns to appreciate it.
And no matter how pure a language system you start with, there will always be those wish to introduce gotchas so as to distinguish the erudite from the plebeian - kind of like the co-worker who touches a file named "-rf *" into one of your working directories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @08:48PM
Some of the Imperial units are just better.
An inch = natural distance apart you hold thumb and finger
A foot = natural distance apart you hold hands
A yard = meter (stride length)
A pound = a handful
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:57PM
It would be funny to see Chinese kids do spelling bees in Mandarin. On the plus side, most words only have two characters. On the downside, most characters have multiple radicals.
Washington DC delenda est.