Many spellers at the National Spelling Bee speak other languages besides English. They speak French, German, Tagalog, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Italian, and a lot other languages. I know French, German, Spanish, although I am only conversational in all of them. I only know how to say eat and light in Tagalog. Perhaps in a few years, I will be fluent in at least one of them.
I will admit that I used to highly dislike French. The rules were annoying to me. The long "A" sound can be spelled with é, ée, et, ez, er, and probably many other ways. At least that one did not annoy me as much as the long "O" sound. Those words can be spelled with ot, eau, eaux, maybe just o, and a lot of different ways as well. When it comes to the long "O" words, and the word is a singular noun, ot and eau are in my mind. Take the word rougeot for example. The word is a singular noun, but it can be misspelled as rougeau.
At least French is not really confusing to me anymore.
I have mentioned this several times, but a speller named Anna-Marie Sprenger knows so many languages. She only studied the Spell It! booklet one night before the Bee. Since she knows languages so well, she used roots she knew from each origin. This was her first year in the Bee, too, and I was very impressed. She is fluent in French and Romanian, and if she was given a Romanian word, she most likely would have spelled it correctly. Romanian is a rare language used in the Bee.
If there are language classes at your school, take at least one of them. It may pay off!
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