Phun daey in Fonix

I had a good day on Thursday. I have a low level Phonics class with some new students, and we were going over the er/ir/ur sound. Korean (and Japanese) speakers tend to pronounce this as a sort of airy, short "a" or "o" sound ("bird" sounds like "bahd"), but I taught them to curl their tongues inside their mouths to say it right. It worked out really well -- I was genuinely surprised how quickly they picked it up.

English phonics is a difficult thing, and it's much more complicated than just learning the alphabet sounds. There are two C sounds, two G sounds, and two TH sounds (bathe/bath), and heaven be praised if anyone can made a reliable rule on which one to use. There are the P and the PH sounds -- not a big problem for people who can recognize the "F" sound, but it's a pain for Koreans because #1, there's no "F" sound, and #2, because they notate it with the same "P" sound Korean character (good luck, kids).

Then there are the silent H (hour), the silent B (thumb), the silent N (column), the silent W (write), and the silent K (knife).

We have all sorts of messed up vowels, too. As with the er/ir/ur issue, some are spelled differently but have the same sound. Others have the same spelling but with different sounds, like "Snowplow" and "wood goose." And *some* fit into both those categories, like the OR. "Actor" ends with the same sound as "teacher," but it's different from "corn." *sigh*

One more thing: Word Endings, such as the pronunciation of the S in plurals and the ED in past tenses. Words that end with B, F, K, P, or T sounds have nice, clean S sounds, while all others have slight Z to them. Verbs that end with B, G, J, L, M, N, R, V, or Z sounds get the nice "D" sound, while those with F, K, P, and S make "T" sound. D and T endings make a full "ED" syllable.

Is it any wonder families out here spend so much money over years and years on kids who still can't speak English well? I can barely do it myself....