Your Biggest Challenge in Learning English

Do you remember all of the people who told you that English is one of the hardest languages to learn?  Well, they were right.  This does not mean you can’t learn it. It only means that there are some challenges you will have to overcome..  One of the biggest challenges is learning that English speakers don’t always pronounce words the way they’re spelled.

In fact, there are many words in English that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently, depending on the meaning of the sentence.  For instance.  I might tell you, “Please read the book,”  or I  might say “I read the book yesterday.”  The word “read” is pronounced differently in each sentence; the first pronunciation means to do it now.  The “read” in the second sentence means you did it in the past.

Some words bear the same spelling, but need to be pronounced differently. There are also words the spells differently but they can be pronounced in the same manner. For example, the word “read” is mouthed off differently in these two sentences:

· Read the paper from yesterday.

· I have read yesterday’s paper.

There are also some words that are spelled differently but sound the same.  For example, “weigh” means to tell how heavy something is.  “Way” means a path.  But they both sound the same.

To make things more confusing, there are some words which sound completely unlike how you would think the letters should sound.  For instance, in “lamb,” you never hear the “b” sound and in “night,” you never hear the “g” or “h.”

So how do you learn these words?  In English, we have something called “sight words.”  These are words that you cannot learn to pronounce just by reading the letters.  Instead, as you learn to read and speak English, your teacher or textbook will show you these words and tell you how to say them.  You must then memorize the word and learn to recognize its sound as soon as you see it.

There are 26 letters in the English language, but 52 different sounds.  Each letter and each sound, you’ll encounter as you attempt to learn the language.  It’s up to you to overcome the challenges and learn these difficult sounds and words.

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