Standardize to what though? Personally I like spelling colour, humour etc. with a 'u', pronouncing 'z' like zed. Which standard do we use? I mean, British, American and Canadian English, to use three big ones, all use different spellings and pronounciations for different words. I personally, would not be happy having to standardize to either American or British English and I doubt Americans or British would be happy standardizing to the others.

And that's not even getting into all the other English variations out there.

I think the idea here isn't that we all need to use/not-use "u" in colour or z in - ize. That makes no actual difference to someone trying to spell a word they can say or say a work they're reading.

The point here is that for many words in English, there is no actual link between the letters in the spelling and the sounds in the spoken word.

I've been learning German for a few years. The spelling is easy. I spell 90% of words right first try. If I hear a word I can spell it well enough to look it up in a dictionary and learn what it means.

The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know. Does a work starting with an "n" have a silent "k" in front (or worse, words like honest that start with an "o" sound but are spelt with an h)? No way to know. Does a word end -ite or - ight? No way to know.

There are a lot of surprise complexities that serve a purpose (when you have 2+ words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) or that are just sytlistic (colour vs color). I don't object to that.

But we should stop pretending you can spell out words or that written and spoken words are linked, at least 25% of the time they're not. Just look at that last sentence: there is no W in written and no L in should. No wonder kids struggle with this crap.

> The opposite is true in English. Does a word have "ie" or "ei" in it? There is no way to know.

They may be complicated, but rules exist, and I find it interesting this was the first example you jumped to - there's a rhyme we're taught as kids that works the majority of the time: "'i' before 'e' except after 'c', or when sounded like 'a' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'".

I think this is a really good example actually.

When I was at school (I turned 8 in 2002, I'm a brit in case it matters :) ) it was just "'i' before 'e' except after 'c'".

Thats actually already bad, why swap 2 letters around based on a third if the word sounds the same anyway?

Then we had to add two more caveats to the rule.

And English spelling still doesn't fit this rule, even with the extra bits bolted on. At best it's a guideline (Frequencies or any other pluralised -cy word seems to break it)

Before we learnt 1000 different spellings. Now we learn a rule, but it's quite complex, and then we learn 200 exceptions to this rule.

But for what?

From now on, it's always "ie". Done. Wouldn't that be simpler? We could eliminate the I all together. There is no "I" sound in neighbour or weigh. They should be neybor and way (or if you really need to distinguish all the other Way words, "wey").

Then instead of 1000 hours of frustration, little kids can all spell correctly on day one and get on and do 1000 hours of maths or reading or art or something.

It's the fact that these so-called rules have exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions.

Weird. Foreign. Neither. Keith. None of those are sounded as an 'a'.

That's why we can't realistically generalise and say these rules are actual rules - they're more rule of thumb. If you're lucky.

But if you've never seen "weigh" written, how would you spell it. That's the issue, not that we need to memorize baroque hints for words whose spelling we can't fully remember because it's essentially impossible to generate the spelling from first principles.

Then there are words like "stein", that just feel like the rules are too good for them.

I've been helping my 4yo learn to read, and...it's brutal trying to explain some stuff. E at the end of the word making the vowel long and is silent? Then you see "have" and "One"? No clue but to just give him the pronunciation. Do any words other than "you" have our making this sound? "Through" but what happens to that gh? "The" and "them" require the th to be spoken differently. Where does the v come from in "of"? Why is the e long in "me"?

In english it's simply not possible to, in general, pronounce a word correctly that you've never heard said or spell a word you've never seen written. This is true even if you limit yourself to only germanic words

The issue with English (I think) is that its a mostly germanic spoken language, with Latin (French) spelling imposed over it. Plus there are an enormous number of foreign words added sometimes with their original spelling, sometimes with a hacked phonetic version.

I assumed all languages were like this (spelling only loosely/occasionally linked to pronunciation). But German manages it just fine.

I always found it frustrating being told to sound out words and everyone acting like this system worked when I was a kid. It put me off reading/writing etc. Not sure what I can suggest other than being honest and saying "yeah, you're right, that word makes no sense".