Carmela Dutra's Blog - Posts Tagged "understanding"

I have often heard that the English language is one of the hardest languages to learn, let alone master. As English is my mother tongue, it’s hard to empathise. I don’t even have any recollection of learning how to read in kindergarten whilst English classes in high school all seemed a blur.

I was therefore not prepared to deal with the challenges when my daughter started pre-school. At the age of four, she began her reading journey and they did so phonetically. That in itself was hard enough for me to wrap my head around! Now that she is six, I have begun to really notice the difficulties of the language and my incapability of explaining why some words are the way they are!

Here are some examples that make my life difficult as a parent:

How does one explain that the words ‘rough’ and ‘dough’, although only have one different consonant, are pronounced so differently? I am still stumped for an answer.

Why is the past tense rule of adding ‘ed’ to end of every verb not consistent? In fact, the exceptions to the rule are aplenty! Why is the past tense of ‘buy’ not ‘buyed’, ‘run’ not ‘runned’ or ‘sleep’ not sleeped’? I am constantly correcting her. I sound like a broken record.

-- I hope everyone has enjoyed a look at my latest blog on the topic of Children's Literature. I invite you to pop over to my blog page to finish reading the rest! Please feel free to leave a comment while you are there.

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