''LOSE'' AND ''LOOSE''

Damian   Thursday, September 16, 2004, 20:46 GMT
<<The fact is, such "rich" and "developed" and "mighty" countries like USA, Great Britain, Australia etc. can't even teach their people to spell their own language correctly....I wonder how that happened?>>

It seems to be happening in all these countries, I think....people leave school as soon as they reach the minimum school leaving age barely able to read or even write their own names. It must be a problem of society, and dysfunctional family relationships. Most seem to come from single parent families for a start, and there are loads of them in the UK. My answer then for a possible reason:-

Societal.
Marie   Friday, September 17, 2004, 02:43 GMT
Sanja, I agree with all Mi5 Mick had said in this thread regarding illiteracy, I couldn't even try to phrase it better. I'll just add that every country, highly developed or not, has their illiteracy problems. Apart from forums like this one, people also sometimes don't want to be bothered with writing out words, I'm not condoning it, but I know I'm guilty of condensing words to as close as the way they sound if no one really cares. As for pronouncing words 'incorrectly', its been said in this forum time and time again that even if our native language is the same, we'll pronounce words differently and not necessarily because of a lack of knowledge of how a word is really spelled. Oh, and of course even the most brilliant spellers make mistakes.
I was just wondering, how many languages do you feel you can-- without a doubt-- spell words correctly in? I ask this question because you've noticed more illiteracy problems amongst english speakers. I wouldn't be able to judge the correct spelling of words in other languages because the only other language that I'd have a better chance of recognising bad spelling in, is french.

Excuse me for fibbing, I wrote more than I intended to, even though I said Mi5 Mick said all of what I'd want to say.