revolutionizing English orthography (poorly)

an introduction to PCUES, interactive orthography, and hearing the "e" in "spelling"

[austync]

I can’t believe that PCUES struggles with the most basic and common English words such as fhqwhgads

[TheKacperuss]

So, if I understand it correctly, "double u" consists of 7 silent letters and a hidden "w"

[pflh]

it goes from "this is from a cute little non profit organization that has a noble cause"
to "this sucks lmao" really fast

[lia]

Regardless of how good or not good PCUES' look might be from an aesthetic standpoint, I think it would be HELL for dyslexic children.

[codeender]

their reply really bothers me... it's extremely passive-aggressive and entitled. The equivalent of "I reject all other opinions that differ from my own, but you need to be more open to accept mine"

[unvergebeneid]

I knew the British pronounced zebra differently, I just didn't know it was like "zedbruh."

[ByzantineDarkwraith]

They literally acknowledge that the connection learners make between the letters and their letter names can trip them up when learning… So they decided to do *literally everything in their power to reinforce that connection* … WHY??!

[EebstertheGreat]

Now that there is an edge case for "one, " PCUES will say that the W is silent in "wonder."

[ssjgohan]

The more I think about this, the worse it gets. I think you just scratched the surface. Let's think about PCUES strictly as an educational tool:
- Kids learn how to read and write at about the same time. We already know that fonts in general fuck a lot with the speed at which kids learn to write, now we're bringing in modified letters to an already not-writing-like font? Like, back in the day when I was learning cursive and capital letters, there was a huge discussion already on whether cursive s and a should be changed to better reflect common glyph forms. That's just two letters that often take a few days to properly get into kids' brains.
- Dyslexia. Wow, this is horrible. Some things are fine - rotating an r at the end of the word should be legible. But wider and bold letters in the middle of a word? That's going to fuck massively with glyph direction in the mind of a dyslexic child.
- PCUES commonly teaches single word pronunciation but not systematics. A lot. Spelling, dwelling, fire, wire, one, won are PQ'ed similarly but represent wildly different systematics. This is basically completely against modern teaching techniques that emphasize systematization over rote memorization. PCUES is not part of a complete education system, and mixing educational styles comes with a switching cost for both kids and teachers. Conversely, having interlocking and referenceable teaching techniques across subjects is massively helpful.
- I think the worst part is just the nonportability of any of the principles behind PCUES into late childhood and adulthood. We teach and use teaching tools that aren't just useful to one age group and one subject - teaching tools and subjects are chosen to be of particular value in your entire life. IPA or furigana would actually be useful your entire life. PCUES only (arguably) solves one very small problem in learning to read. You have to look at the opportunity cost of spending that much time with an otherwise useless teaching tool.

[PiercingSight]

"Do you hear the 'e' in 'spelling'? No."
This tells me that they didn't include this weird rule of bold letters sounding like their names to cater to kids that think letters sound like their names, but they included it because *they legitimately believe that that's why those words are pronounced that way.*

I don't know how to respond to that.

[malefactory]

I'm unsure if this is helpful to you as a content creator, but I find this to be extremely engaging and I appreciate the direction you're taking this channel.

[rikafurude]

That ‘hypothetical’ scenario you discussed with not pronouncing certain names is actually something that happened to me as a kid! I had a copy of this educational science pc game or something, the kind you get from some magazine, and for whatever reason it had a button next to the ‘Enter Name’ text field that would read whatever was in it with text-to-speech. Since my birthname is Gaelic, it pronounced it completely wrong. But as I was quite young I just believed what it said and that I must have been saying it wrong! I did work out it was the computer pronouncing it wrong due to limitations not too long after though!

[dard]

When you said, "Ok, here's The Thing, " I envisioned a version of this video that just cut to The Thing (1982) and quickly decided that the only reason not to do that is because of the comparative difference in length for that joke.

[Zestieee]

If children actually associated the letter names as their actual sound imagine how Greek kids must feel growing up

[coinmatic]

I think my biggest issue with that corporate reply, is that it ignores that while yes, kids learn abc's before they learn to spell, by the time they've learned their abc's they've learned the basics of english speech, and are familiar with how words *sound*.

[simplycinemad]

If a child used this system and then tried to learn how to write any other language that uses the latin script, they would kinda have to relearn almost everything about reading

[CyborusYT]

shoutout to the patrons named "is this supposed to be your real name" and "The Entire Population of Greenland"

[LilyTengoku]

omg it's the rhythm heaven guy back with another language video

[consciouscode]

That response from PCUES drips of "we had an idea and already dumped thousands into it before realizing it was a mistake too late to actually back out, so we are 100% correct and no one can tell us otherwise"

[JacksonBockus]

Okay I know you’re taking their word for it that they somewhat know what they’re talking about, but any time someone responds to criticism with “you clearly just need to expand your mind to see how we’re actually correct” it sets off my bullshit detectors immediately.