User blog:Angel Emfrbl/Ponetics

The second thing I want to discuss was something that was on TV yesturday that is relvent to the Vocaloid franchise. And having worked with Vocaloid, I know that there are many issues you face with working out phonetics in Vocaloid alone.

The debate was if phonics should be taught primarily over other English methods of learning the language. There were good and bad things raised by either side, but I felt that as a Vocalodi fan the debate was one sided; you can't push phonics on kids.

My uncle was taught Phonics at school, because a number of decades ago it was brought in. Phonics is basically teaching English via how it sounds rather then how a word is spelt. In theory, it should be simple. The result? My uncle can't actually spell and has a form of Dyslexia, not brought on by genetics like mine, but via academic failure.

As anyone here should know, the English language is a complex language with many "rules" - all of which it can break at any one point in time without warning. Its a language which uses Roman, celtic, viking, Indian, French and other to construct a messy language, it doesn't always fall into order as one thinks it will. for languages such as Japanese, where the rules are solid, and there are few breakages of said sound rules, phonics work well. In English... Words just don't match how you say them in spelling. And to make matters worst, those silent letters and voiceless vowel sounds...

The issue my uncle faced was he learnt how to spell via how it sounded first, but the trouble was it didn't work when he was spelling "Sky" as "skigh". Modern phonics does now deal with this problem, but he had to re-learn English and was set back by the way he was taught. And had I learnt how to spelling how I sounded words as a child, my dyslexia might have been much worst as for years I couldn't get he "r" sounds to come out, they came out as a "w" sound due to a speak issue that came with my dyslexia. And as one woman raised on the show, her Irish accent left her daughter spelling "do" as "dow" when faced with phonic spelling.

In short, phonetics works when a standard level of English is considered, but when accents, those rule breaking words and other issues that plague the language are faced, then its worst then what we have. The big issue which was raised was, to force everyone into this is going to have more of a bad outcome then good and this is what they want to do. :-/

To put it more precisely, phonics in English is like learning a new language on top of a existing one. I kinda hope they don't bring it in as a standard, because I honestly look at the failures of my uncle; in fact his ENTIRE CLASS had a issue with spelling - my mother, who carries the dyslexia trait, has better spelling then my uncle who doesn't???

I don't see this being useful 100% of the time. The complaint seems to stem from the fact that people complaining that others' don't know how to spell whole words or make speak them. Whenever I break words down for use in VOCALOID, I find spelling and phonetics just don't match up to each other most of the time, so if I can spot the concerns one should have here, I'm sure its an issue that they should consider before condemning generations of school kids to something that may or may not actually help them.

But speaking as a dyslexic... I find the whole situation amusing regardless, because, hey, my uncle can't spell because of the failure of phonics then and when your a worst spelling then someone who is proven to be clinically dyslexic, you know your in trouble. :-D

Incidentally, when I tried to improve my dyslexic spellings, I failed even though phonics was recommended to me I couldn't make it work. I was an adult by this point, but not stupid, but what made it difficult was that I couldn't remember things as I said them.

But hey, look, I related to a subject on TV because of Vocaloid, how weird is that???