Are people who learn via videos, audio media, or social interaction dumber?
That depends. Which type of media has a denser word count, and goes into deeper detail? Which format requires active attention to consume? Which format enables side by side comparison with other works? Which formats sacrifice accuracy to try and grab attention with dazzle and drama? Which format uses more varied vocabulary and sentence structure?
But it isn’t saying someone is smarter. It may be more accurate to ask which person is better informed; a reader or a watcher / listener?
My wife is Jewish. One day when she was very little, she and her mother were walking around the neighborhood and saw a Christmas wreath hanging somewhere. Having previously read the word in a book where it was spelled a lot like the word “breath,” she asked her mother why they didn’t have a “wreth” in their home.
In our household we now and forever pronounce it “wreth” on purpose because of how much I love that story.
I wonder how this works for logographic systems like Chinese, where the letter tells you nothing about the sound (though tbf English spelling is so bad that it’s almost at that level too).
I studied Malayalam (the language of Kerala state in southern India) and the script was fucking awesome. It’s purely syllabic and it’s impossible to pronounce a written word wrong - you just sound out the syllables and you’ve got it. Everything else about the language was impossibly alien to me as a native English speaker (like you can’t just say yes or no, you can only negate or affirm other words), but at least the script was easy.
Mispronounced words by British people are unacceptable though. The Brits need to be stopped!
And their wacky spellings.
Seriously though, I know there is no right or wrong, just cultures but “vit-a-min” (vit rhyming with bit) for vitamin , “al-loo-minium” for aluminum and “let-toos” for lettuce is like fingernails on a chalkboard. lol
They invented the language, the least they could do is spell and pronounce it right.
