English | A Dreadful Language?

English is a playful and sometimes tricky language. If often seems to take special pleasure in confusing new learners. It often seems to enjoy confusing new learners. For students, pronunciation can feel less like learning and more like running through an obstacle course. That is why many people call English a “dreadful language.”

Why is English a ‘dreadful language’?

English is described as ‘dreadful’ because of its irregular pronunciation rules, confusing spellings, and many exceptions that make learning and speaking it challenging.

Here is an interesting poem called A Dreadful Language called English.

Often attributed to T.S. Watt (published around 1954) or sometimes anonymous, the poem uses rhyming couplets to show how words with similar spellings are pronounced differently.

The Poem | A Dreadful Language Called English

I take it you already know

Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you

On hiccough, through, laugh and through?

Well done! And now you wish perhaps

To learn of these familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word

That looks like beard and sounds like bird!

And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead,

For Goodness’ sake, don’t call it dee!

Watch out for meat and great and threat,

They rhyme with suite and straight  and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother

Nor both in bother, broth in brother,

And here is not a match for there,

Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there’s dose and rose and lose

Just look them up – and goose and choose.

And cork and work and card and ward.

And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go and thwart and cart –

Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man Alive,

I’d mastered it when I was five.

Hope you had a roller coaster ride reading the poem using your mental gymnastics.

Another well-known and much longer poem on this same subject is “The Chaos” (1922) by Gerard Nolst Trenité, which contains over 800 examples of irregular English spelling and pronunciation.

If interested, Click Here to read that Poem