Regional speech patterns or just laziness?

[KitSileya]

61. Well, considering I teach EFL in Norway,

English spelling is pretty much a case of 'there are no rules, just learn things by heart.' Luckily, Norway is one of the countries where they *don't* dub movies and television, so they have a much better grasp of how different languages sound, not just English. Anyone with even a smidgen of musicality picks it up pretty easily. They can hear the difference between Russian, Greek, Mandarin, and Igbo - they don't understand a word, most likely, but they do have the ability to keep them apart. A lot of people from countries where they dub extensively don't have that.

And if they attend a school system where English is taught in the mother tongue, they have a disadvantage when it comes to English too. I remember visiting an Italian high school that specialized in languages - this was in 1993 - where the students had English classes taught in Italian. It shocked us quite a lot. We were learning Italian as a third foreign language (English being the first, though not a foreign language for me, of course, and then either French or German from middle school, and then Italian in high school) and our teacher had started to speak Italian pretty much exclusively in the classroom after 2 1/2 years of classes.

Of course, I teach my English classes in high school pretty much exclusively in English. (If I don't have minority speakers who haven't had much English in the classroom, in which case I use any and all languages I know to make sure they understand.) I have had classes who were very surprised to hear me speak Norwegian outside the classroom, as they didn't think I spoke it! But I love languages, so am refreshing my Italian this summer, and continuing with Japanese classes this fall.