WORD CONFUSION

Growing up, I often heard that learning English was hard. As a native speaker, I recognized some stumbling blocks myself. Yet, I thought there must be much harder languages like Chinese, for instance. At least English uses the same alphabet as many other languages.

Now I know that the criticism I heard as a child applied to non-native speakers who struggled to acquire a working knowledge of English. I can see now how listening to English without seeing it written could be even more confusing than just tripping over the spelling of homonyms.

For example, there are three words that sound like “tense.” Two are nouns, “tents” and “tense” (as in present or past tense). Yes, I know there is a “t” near the end of one of these, but only the British are likely to enunciate the letter. “Tense” is also a verb or adjective. Notice there is no variation in spelling for the three uses of  “tense.”  You tense (flex) your muscles doing exercise. Your nervous disposition is called “tense” (adjective). Or it can describe the tightness of a stretched cord.

How confusing it must be to a non-native speaker to hear, “He was two tents today,” when the speaker actually said, “He was too tense today.” Can you see the poor non-native speaker trying to grapple with a human being transforming into tents?

Another example is the sound “pray.” In this case there are two verb uses and one noun. Pray by itself is a verb. Its homonym “prey” is the one playing games with the hearer. Prey is both the object pursued (noun) and the action (verb) of pursuit. But to the ear, all three sound the same. Imagine hearing “He likes to pray on animals of all kinds,” when the speaker was using the other “prey.” Did you see a male kneeling in prayer beside an animal or offering a blessing over a herd?

These are just a couple of examples. The actual list is much larger and more challenging to the non-native speaker. No wonder they ask that we native speakers talk slowly. They need time to translate, reject, and start over.