*sigh* Don't tell Fal, but it's one of my pet peeves.

As Faldo sez, it's OK to have pet peeves. We all do have them., but at some point the language just moves on, and we older speakers are left behind. I collect 19th century (and earlier) usage books and prescriptive grammars. It is fun to see what were the hot pet peeves of many of their authors. To jeopardize is a good example: turns out we should use the verb to jeopard. And, that's why, while it does annoy me when people say things like "To air is human" rather than "to err is human", I just chuckle silently to myself and wonder how language changes in spite of what some of its speakers consciously desire.

Students often complain that Spanish is, get this, "harder than English". Oy. It's obvious they don't know English well (they really don't).

Well, the value of vowels in English is different from most other languages that use the Latin alphabet. This is also complicated by the fact that some of the terminology used by (traditional) grammarians of English is just plain wrong. English does not have phonemic lengthening of vowels. period. Old English did distinguish between long and short vowels (as do German and Dutch), but the long vowels in Old English had the same value as their short corresponding vowels. Not so in English. What we call long vowels are mostly not even vowels, but diphthongs.

But Spanish vowels make learning the language so much easier, because there is only the one set, no long and short. In fact, once they are learned, one can read anything in Spanish, whether one understands it or not, and pronounce every word correctly. Try that in English!

That's what I'm on about. We spend an inordinate amount of time teaching kids how to read because we have a terrible orthography for English. (Mind you, it's not as bad as some; I am currently learning Japanese, and their whole writing system is really much worse.) The down-side to having a sound [no pun intended] phonemic spelling system is, you do not have a need for spelling bees. The only spelling mistakes I've seen in (Mexican) Spanish are confusion of intervocalic b and v *dever or deber 'to owe'.

Ceci n'est pas un seing.