SHORT WORDS

I have always found oral understanding in English the hardest skill for a learner, at least for people studying it as a foreign language, i.e. living in a country where English is not spoken and getting knowledge mainly from lessons and books. If I compare a similar situation when learning other languages, I’d say that the difficulty lessens in the case of languages with longer words. I think that speech in languages with a large number of monosyllables goes faster and demands a bigger effort on the part of the non-native speaker.

I remember a mnemonic technique used by a teacher in a summer course I attended in Bournemouth years ago. It was the first day and she asked us, the students, to try to find words in English which sounded close to our names in order to help her remember them. Although it could seem a difficult and silly task, it turned out easy, fun and effective for its goal. In fact, I still remember the answers provided by some of my classmates or my own. These are some examples: ‘each arrow’ (Itxaro), ‘me? well’ (Miguel), ‘car men’ (Carmen), ‘in a key’ (Iñaki), ‘my tea’ (Maite). I cannot imagine doing this kind of exercise in the other languages I know, probably because it is harder to find so many short lexical items.

A different question is that of spelling. Short pronunciation does not always correspond to little writing, as it can be seen when reading about the the longest one-syllable English word. Taking that into account, pollysyllabic items can really stretch along our paper or screen. We ca find some impressive examples when trying to learn about the longest English word.