Being A Child

My eldest daughter was teaching her younger sister to read and was explaining it phoenitically. If you don’t know what phonics is, it is pronouncing the letters the way it sounds, not the way it is pronounced. Yeah my explanation sucks. For example you pronounce the letter ‘s’ not ‘ass’, but instead ‘ssss..’ as in hissing. Theoretically it is supposed to help in reading, as it makes the letters sound ‘closer’ to their real use.

But then you come to the unusual word, such as ‘the’. My eldest (M) started to explain to her little sister (R), how to map the word out. It went something like this. Italics are my explanation for you readers.

M: You see this is the letter ‘deh’ (for the letter t) and then ‘eh’ (for the letter ‘h’) and then ‘ee’ (for the letter ‘e’). What is the word?
R: Deh.. ehh… eee… thee?
M: Yeah but you drop the ‘ee’, so it becomes ‘the’. It’s confusing right, yeah English is confusing.

The little sister just listened patiently and the bigger sister continued equally patient. She then tried explaining another word. I couldn’t remember the word but it was also an exception to the phonics system. What was funny, and equally annoying to me was the explanation always ended with, “It’s confusing right? Don’t worry, English is like that.” My eldest kept repeating that. What is interesting though the little sister didn’t seem to be bothered. They did stopped after a while when she got bored.

I however was getting more annoyed everytime my daughter kept repeating the mantra and reinforcing how English is hard. The little sister was not bothered so I thought to myself, kids sometimes don’t listen much to what other people said, and that is actually a good thing. Sometimes or actually most of the time, we adults tend to care more about what people say, but I guess that comes from growing up and joining the community, where social feedback impacts a lot of what goes on with your life. Still, I think it is a good thing to have thick ears and thick skin, and not care too much what other people think.

“So what if English is hard? I’ll stop now and continue learning tomorrow,” is what I think my youngest daughter was thinking. Or it might even be that the comment didn’t even register in her mind. That is better, because instead of spending mental capacity thinking about how hard certain things are, might as well focus on learning that ‘hard’ thing.

Thank you for reading.