Stahlke Adoption

English is hard

When we lived first in Hong Kong and then in Germany, I witnessed friends from those countries struggling to understand the idiosyncrasies of English. It made me grateful that I was born in the U.S., since English is such a difficult language to learn. Now our children are facing the same challenges, although they are fortunate to be doing so before puberty and the "hardening" of nerves that makes language acquisition so much harder for adults.

It's very interesting to hear our children's questions about English, which often concern issues that have never occurred to me. For example, after watching a news story on TV, they asked me why the announcer said an adult had been kidnapped. Shouldn't there be a different word for adults, since "kid"napped is obviously about children?

A few days ago, Lena was eating her stew and found a large square piece of over-cooked celery. She told us it looked like a giant's nail, but all of us thought she was calling it a giant snail. A lively conversation about escargot ensued, with the expected exclamations from the kids that THEY would never eat snails. Lena, meanwhile, was looking confused, since she hadn't mentioned snails at all. This particular homophone is especially fun because the spelling of "giant's nail" and "giant snail" is identical except for one apostrophe.

posted by Stahlkes @ 10:59 AM