English language is easy to learn as far as speaking goes but, boy oh boy, the written part of it is not so easy anymore. There is the spelling and then the sentence order that is sometimes completely different from the one in the Czech language. If I have to name my least favorite English word to spell it would have to be:
NEIGHBORHOOD
Why not just ‘nejbrhud’??? ;)) (That’s written in a Czech phonetics)
No, seriously, there is too much stuff going on for a word like that. Every time I am writing it I have to slow down, put myself mentally in the mind of a first-grader, turn on all of my thinking caps and then maybe I get it right for the first time…but probably not.
What is your least favorite English word to spell?
CZ: Kdyby se vas nekdo zeptal, jake anglicke slovo se vam speluje nejhur, co byste mu rekli? Pro mne by to bylo asi slovo ‘NEIGHBORHOOD’. Proc si vsichni neulehcime zivoty a nezacneme ho psat jako ‘nejbrhud’? 😉
Pokazde, kdyz ho pisu na papir (nebo vytukavam na klavesnici), tak se musim uplne zastavit, predstavit si jako ze jsem zase v prvni tride, zapnout vsechny mozkove bunky, a pak se mi to mozna napoprve podari….nebo taky ne.
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Well, you got it wrong again 😉 There’s only one “o” in the “bor” part of the word.
Ups, that was actually just a typo 🙂
well, there are 2 versions: neighborhood and neighbourhood…just like centre/center and color/colour. thank goodness i had super strict grammar teachers in public school. and then there are the Czech word…where do you put a “y”, where do you put a “i”? need a brush up on the rules 🙂
miscellaneous, Cincinnati
Just wait till your girls are at school and you need to help them with spelling. 🙂 And the rules.
Miscellaneous is pretty bad too….
And yes, when the girls will be at school, I will be sharpening my own school pencils too 😉
Like I told my students when I was in Prague, it’s all about memorization, even for those of us who grew up speaking English. I get stuck on “vacuum.” The word always looks wrong to me! But I see native English speakers spelling words incorrectly all the time — even easy words:/
I’m sure you’ve heard the little spelling rule that English children memorize: “i before e, except after c, or when it says ‘a’ as in neighbor and weigh.” That’s how I always remember “neighbor” or “neighborhood.”
Yes, i before e and then they ALWAYS misspell my last name, which is German and should be e before i….don’t get me started! I always had problems with “successful”, put “ll” at the end, like “full of success”, right? That would be too logical! And color and colour, center and centre…those are differences between British and American English, originally I was taught British, now living in America had to switch. Oh well 🙂
I never get right this: “over-exaggeration”
These words below even Americans cannot spell right:
Fredon (pronounced as Freedon, like in Freedom)
Gloucester (prononunced as Glauster)
Czech (mostly spelled as Check)
oh Eva, don’t get me started on name spelling…my maiden name was Herzanova, then dad dropped the “ova” when we came to Canada…hmmm not sure if that would have made things more or less interesting…the piles of mail i have received over the years with interesting spellings, often addressed to “Mr.”….i am used to it by now and joke about it all the time. just the other day, “first name please”…”yes, that is my first name”…” can you spell that please”…”sure”… LOL
in gr 4, i remember so well, i had trouble with vacuum…grrrr…so i just plain memorized it for the spelling tests 🙂 some things don’t make sense but go with it. what is more flabbergasting is the spelling of my 20 something family members…is it laziness? i “get” acronyms but you can’t use them all the time, good grammar and punctuation are a must just to get in the door of any workplace. when in the position of screening candidates for our department those with spelling errors were put in the “b-bye” pile pronto. i think it has much to do with the whole language approach that is being taught in the schools, less emphasis on spelling…sigh
I have trouble with “recommendation”. I can never remember if there are two c’s or two m’s. But don’t fret the spelling too much. Americans are used to seeing misspelled words. We know our language isn’t logical when it comes to spelling and most of us have our quirks with certian words we just can’t spell right.
As for the i before e statement — somehow only half of the saying stuck with me “I before e except after c” so pretty much in any word that had an ie, I put the i first – except after c. As you can expect – I misspelled several words knowing only 1/2 the rule. :-/
Oh yeah, “neighborhood” is terrible. and “enlightenment” – I always forget “n” or “m”. But I have to fess I’m not like you Tanja – slow down etc. I surrender directly and ask or just write it wrong and let anyone think that I’m stupid. It’s not very far from the true anyway 🙂 And I’m sure I made mistakes in this writing aswell and not just in writing 🙂 btw I’m in Brno right now and it’s raining and raining and raining… hope you have better weather. wish you nice day, I.
Gosh, “committee”, I will never understand how that one came around. Thankfully I am done with the grad school now.
I am grateful for Spellchecker on my computer. It’s a wonder invention.
wonderful invention
but it makes us kind of dumber. Are we ever going to learn these words with the Spellchecker?
Zuzko, your word is my problem word number one now 😉
This one always gets me thinking:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
(pronounced [ˌɬanvairˌpuɬɡwɨ̞nˌɡɨ̞ɬɡoˌɡɛrəˌχwərnˌdrobuɬˌɬantɨ̞ˌsiljoˌɡoɡoˈɡoːχ]
Tanja, we actually get dumber every year. It is well known fact that total amount of intelligence on the Earth is constant. Number of people on the Earth is bigger every year and they have to share the same amount of intelligence, thus the intelligence per capita is lower and lower. Some of us are quite blessed , because some people are so plain stupid, that their unused share of intelligence can be reused by us 😉
Posh, the word, is it singular or plural?
Vlastimile,your statement sounds so official, that it makes me believe there must be some kind of mathematical equation, with derivatives involved, of course.
Posh, that looks like some German word to me, but your world is much superior, since the longest German word is:
Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän
:))
I love to spell and I don’t care how people spell online as long as they get the point across. I got slack from some smartass way back when on this blog for the way I spelled my posts and it was hillarious that her post was mispelled. LOL At least, I’ve been published and I barely ever have my work edited by editors, because I check it, before I submit. Blah, blah, blah on the internet shouldn’t matter to anyone. My belief is that if someone is going to publish something, be it a newspaper article or book, then they should check their work, of course. On a blog, not so much. Sometimes, Tanya, your blog posts are a bit nonEnglish, because I think you think in Czech so you translate your titles that way, but you didn’t grow up here, and it’s not your first language. Also, you’re not running a newspaper here. On a blog no one should whine about spelling or diction. Everyone should just relax and enjoy the content.
By the way – having favorites among English words to spell – hm, I like words that have silent letters, it’s fun to guess the spelling 😉 Spelling is fun. I make mistakes too, and believe me, Americans are the worst spellers, so foreigners should just sit back and relax. (Unless, like I said before, they are trying to publish something. Then, it’s either put up or shut up.) BTW hello to all again.
MariKa, it is grejt tu si ju agejn 😉
strengthen.. really don’t like th in that order in that word 🙂
Hi all. I’m american and yet some of the words I find most confusing are the ones that sound the same (or similar) but have different means. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the ensure vs. insure discussion. English is certainly not as logical or phonetic as other languages, which makes things more difficult. I admire anyone who at least tries to tackle some of the more difficult words. 🙂
I don’t understand that if we have “ensure”, why don’t we write “enpower”? If we write “empower”, shouldn’t we write “emsure”?