You will like this link if you speak Spanish and/ or have Spanish friends, and it will also be amusing for those poor devils who have to teach the wretched English language to foreigners.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/25418215/Espanoles-Buscando-en?from_email_04_friend_send=1&emid=6778363

It shows the spellings used by Spanish speakers when doing searches for (mainly English-speaking) stars on Google. Some of them are absolutely priceless, and my particular favourite is “Chespir in Love”. Shakespeare himself couldn’t even decide how to spell his name, but I presume it was always pronounced in the same way. This problem is unheard of in many languages (including Spanish) as the spelling dictates the pronunciation. A couple of names that are missing are Jon Baine and Clin Isbud (say it aloud in a Spanish accent). I always remember a Spanish friend talking about a magazine that she liked to buy; it sounded like she was saying “Bogay”, and eventually I realised she was talking about Vogue…

This proves the impossibly difficult relationship between spelling and sounds in the English language, old news perhaps for English teachers, but if you’d never thought of this before, just think how we pronounce the words “rough”, “bough”, “thorough” and “through”. Four totally difficult ways of pronouncing the letters “-ough”. No wonder teaching English as a foreign language is a multi-zillion pound industry. It’s a marketer’s dream, a language that you think you can learn from a book but never will thanks to its devilishly tricky phonetics. The grammar is relatively simply compared to languages like Spanish, French and German (no lists of endings to learn, no subjunctives to trip you up), but how on earth do you learn how to say it?

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