3 ms·

I distinctly remember that being how I learnt to read. By sounding out the words, I couldn't imagine any other way?

• taneq 7y ago
  Yeah, is this not how people learn to read? Seasame Street was doing it back in the 80s!
• sethammons 7y ago
  I think the level of "sounding out" can vary. I learned to read "on my own" when I was 3 or 4 by realizing that the story my dad kept reading to me each night had the same exact words spoken on the same page. I realized the words on the page were related, so I would scan ahead and see the symbol "by" coming up, and he would say "by"! I picked out other small words and linked them to symbols and then linked larger sections of words. This ended up like sounding it out, but by word-parts, not by letters. My parents were surprised to learn that I could read when I read aloud a long word on a road sign as we were driving. "Tippecanoe." With my kids, they did not follow my path and were uninterested in relating words to their sounds as we read books together, so we went with hooked on phonics to solid success, where I first learned rules (as a college educated adult mind you) like the sound of "x" (I had never realized what it was, like "ks" in "ax" - pronounced "ah-ks") and where I learned that a vowel typically says it's name if followed by a consonant and another vowel. I hadn't developed sounding out letters, I only sounded out parts of words in relation to other words I was aware of. I think this could be part of my issues with spelling in school.