Hooked on Phonics, worked for me!

Why do we use silent letters to change the sounjd of a word instead of just spelling a word phonetically? Like changing "Through" to "thru" or something. But that would mess up "threw" and aiojmfiosnmgkl. I give up.

You guys know how freakin hard was for me to learn your language with just pokemon and videogames?...

Here i am, being told that "Th" in english has a somewhat muted F sound (how the hell do you have a Somewhat Muted anything?) like in Theater and Thanks! And here i am going "But "That" "This" "those" and many other words have no Muted F at all....".

All i can say is that English class in School was never good (3 years learning "To Be"?) So thank heavens for Poke Rap and Square Enix. )

Well, at least on the "gh" thing, it's probably all a corruption of a rough aspiration, better known as that sound that kinda sounds like you're hawking up a lugie.

By muted F they mean more something like a lisp. No one ever taught it to me like that. They should though. My teachers always went like "Uh... put your tongue there like that and then uh... blow??? NO NOT LIKE THAT! You're doing it wrong.
I never let anyone in on my secret.

Anyway, the stuff in the opening post is by no means exclusive to English.
I'm sort of interested in linguistics, but it's been way too long since I read anything on that subject. All I know is that english belongs to the tribe of germanic languages. Which is probably where the "gh"s come from. Which are "ch"s in German and they do make sense there.

But then English is influenced by probably everything else more than any other language.

th is a dental fricative and that is the only proper way to describe it you savages :crossarms:

Seriously though, once you learn basic phonetics and know about points of articulation and all that, learning and teaching pronunciation become about 1000 times easier. In no small part because you don't have to bother with vague instructions like "place your tongue here and blow" and can instead say "dental fricative" and that's as precise as it gets. They really should teach that in school.

this might all be wrong.
 

According to my word origins classes, the guy who standardized the printing press can be thanked for a lot of the crazy spellings.

See, things used to be spelled a lot more phonetically, because there wasn't really a standardized way to spell anything, so everyone just spelled everything however it sounded right to them.

Then the guy who standardized the press decided to spell things based on how he sounded things out, while everyone else was pronouncing it differently or something.

I wasn't really listening in class though, as you can probably tell from my notes.

I did listen in my linguistics class, but that was Japanese linguistics.

Our language is based entirely in guitar chords.

If you think english is bad, then for gods sake stay away from welsh!!

Seriously how the hell do double Ds make an "ef" sound?

I honestly don't even remember, but I do know I never had as much difficulty with learning it as other people my age seemed to have, whether at school or university. So I'm gonna have to say "not very."

I also recall that at some point during school years me and my circle of friends really got into regular movie nights, and a lot of the movies we watched would be in English, and at some point I also started making an active effort to get my movies and books in English, first to see if I could handle it and pretty soon because I realized the originals were just plain better, and I think that has/had a lot to do with it as well.