Lisa, from the University of Kansas, told Bored Panda straight-up that the main challenge foreign students face when it comes to English is spelling. "English spelling is such a train wreck, with its myriad silent letters and wildly varying pronunciations for letters and letter combinations. But also, articles (a/an/the) tend to be difficult for people whose native language doesn’t have them, and our tense/aspect blend with combinations of auxiliary verbs makes the English verb system tricky even for native speakers sometimes," she explained to Bored Panda.

I was interested to hear the expert's take on spell check. She told Bored Panda that spell check is a great tool for catching typos and misspelled words. However, it's not perfect. "Where it’s more of a curse than a blessing is with homonyms/homophones because it won’t flag a word that is a word, but not the word you want. Think affect/effect, who’s/whose, led/lead but also word pairs like form/from and not-synonyms like bemuse/amuse, etc," she shared. Lisa added that anyone curious about the quirky world of spell check should definitely check out the #SpellCheckCannotSaveYou hashtag on Twitter.

According to Lisa, English isn't 'spelled as it sounds' for a lot of reasons. They're mostly connected to when the words entered the language, where they came from, and when the spelling of a particular word was first 'codified.' I was curious whether a complete overhaul of the spelling system could make things easier for everyone or if it would lead to a loss of the language's character that we love so much.

"People have proposed spelling overhauls before but they tend to not go anywhere, probably because it’s such a daunting project—could we all agree on what the changes would be?—and because then an entire body of texts would become basically a foreign language to the next generation. Many factors in addition to spelling contribute to a language’s 'character,' but some spellings do have echoes of archaic English—in my opinion it would be a little bit sad to lose some of that," Lisa told me.

Personally, I had a difficult time spelling some words when I was a kid, learning my first words in English. For instance, I used to write ‘family’ with two y’s and ‘honey’ as ‘hunny’ like Winnie the Pooh does when I was a munchkin. And for the life of me, I couldn’t spell the word ‘beautiful’ because of how gorgeously long it was. Really, nine letters for something that essentially means ‘pretty?’

I didn’t give up, however. Through sheer force of will and lots of repetition, with the guidance of my parents and some very patient teachers at the Brussels American School, I finally tamed English. It fascinated me. It drew me in. And I couldn’t stop reading and writing ever since. And look at me now! Writing and amusing you Pandas for a living.