CRESS has been carefully designed to be as close to standard spelling as possible. This means you can read it without knowing it at all.
Here’s a sentence in CRESS, and we bet you can read it easily:
- Nau iz da taim for al gud men and wiman tu kam tu da ed av der kantri
Here’s a sentence you haven’t seen before. Can you read it?:
- Ai laik vedztabal sup wis litl animalz in it.
You can easily see the sentence: “I like vegetable soup with little animals in it.” The lesson here is not to be afraid of something new with great benefit, especially if it isn’t that new.
With the slightest bit of attention anyone can read CRESS English even if they don’t know it. Some people joke that it’s just like a French accent that we can can all understand. The French sometimes say wis for with, and we can understand.
But yes, you would be well to ask how in the world that system would work with bits of something like a foreign accent..
The answer is easy. That’s because we only showed BARE CRESS with the arrow symbols removed. When you learn CRESS you use three simple arrows to indicate the tongue positions you already know if you speak English. This represents the sounds correctly in a perfectly regular and consistent manner.
Here’s the same sentence in CRESS with arrows for learners. If you can say a word, you can spell it in CRESS: sounding it out it out easably and reliably.
- Ai laik vedz>ta^b^al su^p wis< lit^l a<nima^lz in it.
Because CRESS it uses what you already know–the English language–it is easy to learn.
In case you haven’t looked at a Quick Start, we should give you a taste…
Look at the right arrow after the first d. Why is it there? Well because if you consciously pull the tonge tip back while saying a long buzzing z sound, you will get a different sound, the one in the middle of the word ‘measure’.
Now look at the two cases of a^ with up arrow in ‘vegetable’. (Or one if you drop the second vowel). What’s that arrow about? Just make a long a sound as in ‘father’. Now as you stretch out that a, for a second or two, push your jaw and tongue up a little bit. You will get the first sound in the word ‘about’, and that is the sound you have (once or) twice in ‘vegetable’.
This is how CRESS is designed to have maximum similarity to standard spelling.