Is It Necessary to Learn the Rules of Spelling?
July 28th 2001
When we begin to learn a foreign language, few of us pay much attention to the rules of spelling. We learn a word just by imitating the sound and try our best to memorize the form and the meaning, without knowing that if we master the rules of spelling, we will be able to learn a word more efficiently, we will be able to pronounce a new word without referring to the phonetic symbol. Some of us think that the rules of spelling are a kind of knowledge, not skill. In fact they are both knowledge and skill.
First, I’d like to point out that it is impossible to pronounce all the English words without referring to the phonetic symbols. After all, English is a mixed language. It is not like other European languages such as German or Russian, in the dictionaries of which, we can not find phonetic symbols. We pronounce a word just by looking at its form, and by hearing its sound, we can make out, quite rightly, its written form.
We can also do this when we learn English. But we can not pronounce all the English words without referring to the phonetic symbols. One reason for this is that English is a mixed language. We can find, in English, a lot of words from other languages, for example, machine and police from French, kungfufrom Chinese, tatami from Japanese, etc.. Another reason is that there are 26 letters in English but there are 48 speech sounds (phonemes) in English. It is not enough for the 26 letters to represent 48 speechsounds. So some sounds are represented by a single letter such as / t /, by t, / p / by p, / m / by m and / v / by v, while other sounds have to be represented by a combination of two or three letters, such as / W / by th, / tF / by ch and tch. But the rules of spelling is complicated due to the fact that sometimes one letter may stand for several sounds while the opposite is also true. For example, or, oor, our, al, oar au and awall stand for the long vowel [R:] and the letter a can represent seven vowel sounds [ei], [A], [B:], [e], [E], [R], [i] in different situations. So the rules of spelling in English, because of the reason mentioned above, are not absolute rules. As a result, not all the English words conform to the rules of spelling.
All the same, there are still 80 percent of English words which conform to the rules. That means, if we grasp the rules of spelling we can pronounce 80 percent of English words without referring to the phonetic symbols. We do not have to worry about the other 20 percent. For, although they do not conform to the rules of spelling, they at least agree with the principle of pronunciation. For example, we all know that the pronunciation of the letter “a” in open syllable is the double vowel /ei/. However, in the word “have”, it is pronounced /æ/. It is not accordance with the rules of spelling, yet it is still consistent with the principle of pronunciation, as each letter in the word except the final “e” corresponds to a sound. All of these sounds can be combined into a syllable. The final “e”, as a general rule, is always silent.
The only two words frequently used in English that are against the principle of pronunciation are “one” and “once”. Because, though the letters “n” and “c” correspond to the sounds /n/ and /s/, we can not find the corresponding letters for the sound / w / and / Q /
It is true that we can not pronounce all the English words with the rules of spelling. But we have to learn them, since the significance of learning the rules of spelling lies not only in pronouncing a word but in memorizing the word as well.
Every word is a trinity of sound, form and meaning. The most natural way of learning a word is like this ;
1 Hearing a sound
2 Associate the sound with a certain object or behavior or a concept.
3 At a much later stage, when we are able to read, we get to know its written form.
But few of us have the opportunity to learn a foreign language in the natural way. We learn it in an artificial way. The steps of learning a foreign language is arranged in scientific, it is said, and artificial order, only not very natural, but it does not seem to work very well. Most of us have learned a foreign language in this way. It is like this;
1 We see a form
2 Try to make out the sound according to phonetic symbol
3 With the help of the native language, try to associate the form and sound with a certain object or behavior or a concept.
When we begin to learn a new word, we have to memorize all the three aspects of it, viz. sound, form and meaning. When we learn our native tongue, we do not have to make a special effort to memorize the sound of a word. Certain sounds come into our ears very day. We have access to a sound long before we know its form. We can associate the sound with the meaning almost immediately after knowing its sound. But it takes us relatively a long time to know its form. When we learn a foreign language, we have access to a sound, form and meaning all at once. It seems that it is not very easy to memorize all the three aspects of a word at the same time. If we can correlate two of them with each other, the difficulty of learning a word will be reduced by half. And though we cannot do this in Chinese, we can absolutely do this in English.
In Chinese, the three aspects of a character have nothing to do with one another, since Chinese is an ideographic language. The form of a character has no connection to its sound system. That is to say, no matter how well we learn Chinese, when we come across a new character, we cannot pronounce it without the help of phonetic symbols(pinyin). No stroke in Chinese characters represents a sound. So every time we see a Chinese character which we have met once or twice but forgot, we have to try out best to recall its pronunciation. If we fail, we have to look it up in a dictionary. Even if we still remember the pronunciation of a character, we may, quite often, forget its written form, as all Chinese have such experiences. It is absolutely impossible to write a forgotten Chinese character just according to its pronunciation.
English, however, is quite different. It is a phonographic language. All the letters in English stand for a sound except the final “e” in most words. So if we know which letters represent which sounds, we can make out the pronunciation of most words without referring to the phonetic symbols. We do not have to worry about forgetting the pronunciation of a word, since every time we see it, we know its pronunciation, and if we see it frequently enough, we memorize its pronunciation naturally. And we do not have to worry about forgetting its written form, since, as long as we remember its pronunciation, we can, often correctly, make out its written form just according to the pronunciation. Now that there are two things we do not have to worry about, that leaves us with only one thing to worry about, the meaning. But the difficulty of memorizing it is reduced almost by 66.%. That means the time we spend in memorizing the words will be reduced at least by 50%. We can spend less time and memorize more words. But this can only be realized by mastering the rules of spelling. So it is absolutely necessary to master the rules of spelling.
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