English has been my pain for 15 years

The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words.

Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this:

    on...
    ono...
    onomat...
    onomato...
    onomatopei...
    onomatopeia

Try saying it out loud this way instead:

    ...a
    ...peia
    ...topeia
    ...matopeia
    ...nomatopeia
    onomatopeia

This will almost always result in learning to pronounce the word much better. I say almost because there probably are words out there that violate this rule, but I haven't come across any of them yet. The reason this approach works is because the first syllable of almost all polysyllabic words in English is pronounced in a more drawn out fashion than the latter syllables. By learning from back to front, you force yourself to learn to draw out the first syllable and shorten up the last syllable(s).

I have found that this rule is also applicable to almost all Romance languages for English speakers learning, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.

If you are a speaker of a second language, I strongly urge you to try this out yourself and get feedback from a native speaker on your pronunciation.

I see that the submitted article, and many of the interesting comments in this busy thread, relate to the issue of the bizarre spelling patterns of English. As a native speaker of General American English (the dialect of English I recommend to foreign learners of English ;) ), I have two perspectives on this.

1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition

http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...

prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.

2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html

about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.

To be honest, as a native French speaker I find it sometimes very hard to understand the French spoken by people from African countries. The same is true for deep countryside French accents, who tend to pronunciation words with different phonemes. (Such as trilled R's)

The parent comment wasn't prescriptive, it was descriptive. You can argue all you'd like that it isn't fair or optimal or good, but you're hard pressed to argue that it isn't true.

"Introvert or extrovert": this is a huge deal when learning and living among foreign speakers. I went through this when I moved to Turkey and I called it an "Identity Crisis", the way other people perceive you is totally different than what you are used to.