Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that’s standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don’t exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!
Masha Bell has analyzed 7000 common words and found that about 1/2 cause spelling and pronunciation difficulties and about 1/3 cause decoding difficulties.
(from wikipedia)
Yeah, I can understand being illiterate in something with a very complex writing systems (like chinese), but english has no excuses. Every language that’s standardized will have their own problems as fluidity of language and strict systems don’t exactly work that well together, but what english has going on would be so simple to improve even with just slight changes!