I am surprised how long the discussion went on before "English is tough stuff" was brought up! For more than thirty years, I have been handing out this poem to numerous native English speaker, and most of them end up laughing too much to complete the reading of it. I have also met a few who read it without any stumbling at all over spellings and pronounciation. Those are the people who didn't learn the letters in grade school: From day one, they learned to read words, as single symbols, almost like Chinese pictograms. Each word identifies a given concept, and the name of that concept has a certain pronounciation, irrespective of the individual pen strokes making up the word. Not until much later will the kids learn to break the word symbol into separate components (letters), to enable them to 'decode' unknown word symbols they might encounter, and to understand how to create a composite word symbol for a concept you know the name of, but haven't learned the word symbol for. Obviously, first grade kids are not introduced to 'concepts' (i.e. the concept of a concept) as such: that is an just academic way of desribing the idea behind. I must admit that I am somewhat fascinated by the idea: Even though a 'concept' is far more abstract than the physical pen strokes, the kid knows very well the concept of, say, an 'apple'. Mapping the 'apple' concept to some (language dependent) pronounced name is an abstraction that the kid usually can handle. Then we break up that sound into another, rather unrelated, concept of small pieces called 'letters' having no direct connection to the apple concept - that is non-trivial! And then these letter concepts are mapped to a graphical representation which is quite independent of the letter concept: The concept of an 'A' can be represented as 'A' or 'a' (in any of ten thousand typefaces), or as the bit pattern 01000001 or 01100001, or as .- (morse), or as the upper left dot in a 2 by 3 matrix (braille)... For a kid to learn to write, the graphical A or a must be further broken sown into separate strokes, and then the kid must learn the fine motor skills to hold a pencil/pen and form these strokes. Learning the word symbol for the concept is a much simpler task! Note that most schools teaching reading by word symbols rather than by letters also hold back the writing till after the kids are reasonably familiar with the word symbols. Usually, they start breaking composite words into individual simple words, such as 'grandmother' is composed of 'grand' and 'mot
