Yeah it’s very easy to get distra

Congratulations for sticking it out to finish this comment

I think the key part is they said they watched ‘American movies’ (presumably in English) ‘dubbed or subbed’, which means they’re probably not themselves first language English speakers.

So if they were watching some scene with a spelling bee (from context), and saw/heard the translation of the word in question, it would be a word in their own language, and probably not at all hard to spell, since in most languages apart from English (with a few exceptions), that’s the case.

That’s one issue. Danish has even more, and other funny phonological stuff going on, though even then has more consistent sound to spelling matching.

Nah the spelling is consistent. The length is hardly an issue than asking a kid to spell a whole English sentence: most of those words are compound nouns that might even be similar in English, just that English uses spaces or words like ‘of’ in between.

“Wow German has a single word for a law about the transmission of tasks for beef labelling supervision!”

I mean yeah, the equivalent of ‘beeflabellingsurveillancetasktransmissionlaw’. Or if we break it down twice, ‘beeffleshlabellingoverwatchingoutgivingoverdraggingslaw’.

It’s not like German has a trillions completely different ultra long words primed for this. They can just be produced as part of the grammar without the convention of spaces. A lot of compound nouns in English could be treated as single words in the same way going purely based on the actual spoken language.

No I think they mean they heard or read it translated into another language where the spelling is much more consistent.

This old chestnut. English isn’t particularly unusual in this regard. What’s unusual - though not unique - is having an old orthography that hasn’t been updated or uniformed to reflect modern pronunciation.

Depends where. But the kids themselves are usually native speakers, and there’s not much difference in level of language level based just on parentage. Socioeconomic factors that effect general education level make far more of an impact when it comes to level of literacy.

This is just wrong. Plenty of spouses and SOs appreciate their partners.