My mom teaches ESL (English as a Second Language) and it is often difficult for her students to learn tricky English grammar and pronunciation rules when they have spoken Spanish most of their lives. Native speakers often don't realize it, but English is a really hard language. Studying orderly, precisely organized Latin in seventh grade made me realize just how bizarre English can be.
Plural of knife is knives
Plural of life is lives
Plural of strife is strifes. or just strife.
Read this sentence: "I had a tough day; though I tried and tried, I could not get through the required reading for Moby Dick." How do you pronounce these words: "tough," "though," and "through"? (I start to feel like I have spelled them wrong after typing them all in a row.)
How do you pronounce "pay" and "say"?
Then how do you pronounce "paid" and "said"?
What is the plural of tooth? What is the plural of booth?
Saying "slim chance" or saying "fat chance" means the same thing, but a "wise man" is different from a "wise guy"
Teachers teach, and preachers preach. The teacher taught. The preacher... praught?
"overlook" means something completely different from "oversee"
A house that "burns up" is the same as a house that "burns down."
To "fill in" a form is to "fill out" a form.
"Quite a few" = "quite a lot"
We turn an alarm on so that it will "go off" the next morning.
I say: Why don't we all just learn Esperanto?
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