Rules for Spelling: How to demystify the English language
English is a pedantic, confusing and downright awkward language to learn with so many seemingly inconsistent patterns and rules, all of which seem to have been specifically created with one purpose: to frustrate and befuddle the poor student trying to learn them. Foreign language students maybe advised to learn English as their first language (in addition to their native one) so as to minimize the degree of inevitable confusion that they will encounter due to the fact that many of the words found in the English language are spelt in a different way than which they are pronounced.
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If you are intending on learning English, and have perhaps been somewhat put off as a result of the comments outlined above please take some degree of comfort from the fact that there are rules which are consistently used and relied upon. They may not cover every single possible eventuality, but they do cover all but the most obscure words making learning that little bit easier.
A prime example of this is the usage and rules concerning the distinction between singular and plural form of nouns (the “things” in the English language)with the description of a noun being upgraded to the plural form by means of attaching an “s” to the end of the word. Therefore, apple becomes apples, banana becomes bananas, car becomes cars.
Now as outlined earlier within the article, not all rules for spelling can be or will be applied in a universal fashion and the plural form of nouns is no different. If a noun should happen to end in one of the following:
-s, -z, -x, -sh, -ch
Then the plural form of the noun will be derived by “es” onto the end of the word, instead of merely the letter “s”.
One rule that will always remain constant for converting singular nouns into the plural form is where the noun ends in the letter y. All nouns that end in the letter y will have the y dropped and replaced with ies to achieve the plural form of the noun. If you have a word that ends in f and you want to make it plural then you can do this simply by omitting the letter f and adding “ves” in its place in order to make it plural.
If a word happens to contain a double ll and you want to either add a prefix or suffix to that word then you will need to lose on l in order to do so. Note that you drop the l from the original word, never from the suffix or the prefix which you are subsequently adding to the word.