The Nature of Written English

There's almost no language in the world that is as difficult to learn and difficult to teach as english. In germany, for example, a struggling reader is judged after a couple of years based on how many words they can decode. The fact that or our language has a real high level of orthographic depth means, effectively, that the connections between the symbols of our writing and the sounds that are represented by that writing aren't there. i personally think that there's no reason why all but a very, very small minority of people shouldn't be able to learn to decode to a competent extent.