Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England.
FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics.
Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces.
As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
I am not sure. It would not surprise me though. As an American, we are always striving to turn the most mundane activities into competitions for some reason...
For what it is worth, I also think British English is more consistent than American English in pronunciation.
For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and "Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.
American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..
Simple words like:
Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"
Interesting => "In-tra-sting"
etc..
> As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.
Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may" without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat", "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.
I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack, ball, etc. are far more consistent.
> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/
French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:
- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)
- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)
- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")
The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)
Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.
My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
To further this, a perfect example are some of the culinary words vs. the animal words in English.
Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.
Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.
It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.
No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing to bet that more native English words have irregular spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have irregular spellig is because English has been a written language for a long time. That is why you have words like Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used to be prounouced.
Knee is the same in German as it is in English. However, the Germans pronounce the K, e.g., "Kah-nee."
The word for "Knight" in German is "Ritter" if I am not mistaken? Though, I have no idea where the word Knight comes from. (Which I intend to look up after posting this).
In spanish we never did this, because even though there's exceptions to spelling rules, there aren't all that many. motivated elementary school children would just not miss barring lack of concentration.