why is the english language so difficult to pronounce and spell

A large number of people claim that the real difficulties in mastering English are its pronunciation and spelling on account of numerous rationales. The following essay takes a look at some of its detailed reasons. To begin with, it is worth noting that English is not a phonetic language; therefore, the written form does not resemble the spoken form closely. In detail, – r, l, b, h, k, n, p, s, t & w are the most confusing bits as they are silent letters some of the time. Then there are letters that can be pronounced in lots of different ways. For instnace ‘s’ can be pronounced as /z/, ‘t’ can be pronounced in at least 5 ways, and an ‘n’ can become /m/ or /ŋ/. Moreover, English contains 19 vowel sounds, but it only has 5 vowels to spell them with. By way of illustration, ‘good’, ‘food’ and ‘blood’ all contain different vowel sounds (/ʊ/, /u: / and /ʌ/). And, even in cases when a letter almost always corresponds with one sound, there is still an exception to every rule. As a result, it is extremely challenging to learn the pronunciation of a word simply from its spelling. Aside from the sounds of English, it is important to join everything together correctly when pronouncing. The most striking feature of English are its various ways of joining words: assimilation, elision, vowel + vowel joining and consonant + vowel joining. Sometimes these are rather bizarre – in the sentence ‘law and order’ only one /r/ would be pronounced – between ‘law_r_and’ – even though it is spelt with a ‘w’. In addition to the aforementioned reasons, the English are famous for different ways of spelling the same sound. This is because English is full of borrowed language, so words that may sound alike when pronouncing them aloud but are not always spelt similarly. In fact, English is made up of words taken from Latin, Greek, French and German, as well as little bits and pieces of other local languages like Celtic and Gaelic. More recently, the English language has also picked up words from countries that used to be part of the British Empire, including India. The words ‘tall’ and ‘shawl’ rhyme, for example, the ‘aw’ sound is spelt differently in each. What is more, some words that are spelt the same but are pronounced differently. These words are called heteronyms. Take ‘desert’, ‘tear’, and ‘number’, for example, can all mean two different things depending on how they are pronounced. In conclusion, English pronunciation and spelling are quite confusing to individuals by virtue of its vowels and consonants as well as borrowed words. However, this difficulty can be tackled via various methods.