AIBU to think we should stop using capital letters entirely?

[MRex]

My toddler is desperate to understand letters, but in cartoon songs he finds little/big letters confusing. This is my sole reason for realising that yes, actually it is confusing. Why do we make everyone learn two letter styles and two pronunciations (normal and phonetic), when they could learn half that and be off reading? While it might train the brain a little, we'd be better using that same training time on learning Mandarin or Russian characters. Anyone who struggles with letters has a better chance getting on if there's only "a" pronounced "ah" to learn too. What great reason to keep both am I missing?

yanbu

I think the capitals are nothing compared to trying to explain why ai ay a-e all sound the same, why ough can be pronounced eleventy ways, and why wonder is pronounced wunder and wander is pronounced wonder.

They'd be better off simplifying the orthography so there's less spelling variations for each phoneme. Not that it will happen, given all the various linguistic inputs into the English language.

Personally I don't understand why they teach the lowercase first, when letters are referred to as their capitals. Bloody "Kicking c's".

It'd be far less confusing for little kids who can't form proper grammatical sentences yet anyway to learn the capitals first.

WHY?

Ok. Your toddler's reading is the reason we need to overhaul the English written language. I get it

YABU. They're a part of punctuation that makes sentences easier to read. A block of text with no capitalisation is not very easy on the eye.

I don't understand what you mean by two pronunciations. As for capital letters, they differentiate between nouns and proper nouns as well as starting sentences. They're so ingrained in our written language, I think you'd have a fight trying to get rid of them

Personally I don't understand why they teach the lowercase first, when letters are referred to as their capitals

We teach lowercase first as they make writing sentences more legible. Blocks of upper case letters are harder to read.

We don't refer to the letters by name at school to start with. We teach the 44 letter sounds and the alternative ways of writing these sounds.

We introduce capitals gradually by both their name and sound, and encourage children to use them to start a sentence and for names, etc.

Bloody "Kicking c's

We don't use 'kicking k' and 'curly c' type phrases.

When someone is learning a foreign language it is INCREDIBLY helpful to have a way of signifying proper nouns that don't need to be translated/follow grammatical rules. Capital letters do that.

That has to win a prize for being the most ridiculous post ever OP!

Capital letters are necessary for legibility and not that much harder to learn.

Phonetics does make the alphabet song a bit redundant it’s true.

Doesn’t Mandarin take years to learn it’s so hard? I’m pretty sure they said that when I did it at work.

You know that most countries use capital letters right?

There are many confusing,frustrating,perplexing and wonderful things about the English language, capitals is not one of them.

Do you really think we should get rid of capital letters because toddler?

If he wants to learn them, fine, but capitals or not, he's not likely to start reading, there's no rush for him to start and it's not necessarily a good thing if he does.

Am I actually reading this? Why must we constantly lower our expectations and standards with language and grammar?

Or
We could wait until they could understand the difference and then teach them to read

What's stopping you from teaching your toddler to read using lowercase first then? You don't have to rely on cartoon songs, you could just write some stuff and teach them how to read it.

Toddlers may find this difficult to start with. Most of us manage admirably by later childhood.

And you know what? They are helpful for all the reasons outlined in above posts.

Op I think following is harder to read than what you put

my toddler is desperate to understand letters, but in cartoon songs he finds little/big letters confusing. this is my sole reason for realising that yes, actually it is confusing. why do we make everyone learn two letter styles and two pronunciations (normal and phonetic), when they could learn half that and be off reading? while it might train the brain a little, we'd be better using that same training time on learning mandarin or russian characters. anyone who struggles with letters has a better chance getting on if there's only "a" pronounced "ah" to learn too. what great reason to keep both am i missing?

If your child can't cope with capital letters how do you think they are going to cope with learning written mandarin or russian?

@pinkyredrose got there before me.
Here's hoping OP's toddler doesn't stumble across Roman numerals

Toddlers are too young to learn to read to the level you are expecting, OP.

hth

But he’ll learn like we all do.

BUT THEN HOW WOULD WE KNOW IF SOMEONE WAS SHOUTING?

Yes let's change the English language because your toddler is finding it hard to learn

DD learnt them at the same time by accident.

She was desperate to "work" on our computer as she's seen daddy do. All our computer did was Word and not much else.
So I let her start typing on the computer. She was happy just to press the buttons for a day. Then she decided she wanted to type proper words. So for about three days her favourite game was for me to sit next to her on the computer and say:
Her: "Write house."
I'd say "h for home, o for orange, u for umbrella, s for snake, e for egg" and point to the letter in question.
By the second day I didn't have to point to the letter.

But it also meant she learnt upper and lower case together as the keyboard had it as uppercase, but the screen showed it as lower case.
It was never set out to teach her letters, just something she thought was fun to do, and had the side effect of her learning her letters very quickly.

I'm a great believer in that if the child wants to learn something like that they will learn. If they find it boring or have no interest they won't. Nothing to do with intelligence or anything else.
Ds learnt how to disable the child lock for the freezer so he could eat raw fishfingers.