Pronunciation Challenges
People commonly complain about the inadequacies of the English spelling system and about the difficulties that arise when they try to pronounce unfamiliar words. Many other languages are not plagued with these problems. Native speakers of English who are learning Czech, Finnish, Spanish, or Polish are delighted to discover that the pronunciation of a word in these languages can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy by its spelling. And conversely, the correct spelling of a word can be fairly easily deduced from its pronunciation. Unfortunately, in English the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is not as close. Just consider, for example, the letter a, which represents a different vowel sound in each of the following words: pat, mane, father, any, village, waffle, wall, was. Or consider the short e sound in pet, which may also be spelled a (any), ae (aesthetic), ai (said), ay (says), ea (thread), ei (heifer), eo (leopard), ie (friendly), oe (roentgen), and u (burial).