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Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. B

Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise. It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT. Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
- zaphar 4y ago
  Phonics based approaches to reading have been a mainstay of private and home school programs for decades. It creates a silly disparity between those who can afford or are willing to sacrifice enough to put there children through them and those who have to use the public school system. Every once in a while the parents will have enough and revolt somehow. I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there. Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
- kritiko 4y ago
  The public education system in the US is ~6 hours per day, ~180 days per year. Of course anybody with the means is supplementing that.
jrochkind1 4y ago
On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell. Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading). On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
- tomrod 4y ago
  My story reflects yours (I was a "late" reader by grade but also the youngest in my grade, and voracious after I found the world larger than my tiny country town). Because we read with our kids, all of them were reading by late 3/early 4 years old, by their own desire. While none have had a propensity for George Orwell at the third grade, they do read things beyond their age levels. I was lucky, and my kids are lucky. I wonder, are there any organizations that folks can volunteer at to help kids at your and my age in elementary school learn to read?
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    I was not considered a "late" reader at all for the early 80s though, at least where I was -- they just didn't try to teach preschoolers to read then and there like they do now. I think what they do now is a mistake... but that could be my own anecdotal prejudices.
- barrkel 4y ago
  Starting X early is IMO a bit of a red herring with child development, especially when they're in the low single digits. Their minds grow in power recognizably on a weekly basis (particularly noticeable when you spend a week apart) that an amazing uphill achievement at time t can be a trivially picked up thing at time t+1. I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new books and understands that they contain stories. A household without that is far more likely to cause issues with reading because the motivation will be missing.
bregma 4y ago
We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored. Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
- joelfried 4y ago
  We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.
  - tivert 4y ago
    >> We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. >> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. > We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge. Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the "whole language" approach people--making the faulty assumption that mere exposure is enough to educate. That works with some, but clearly fails a lot. And even for the kids it works with, I'd be afraid it would leave gaps that would be much better addressed with some explicit instruction. My kid is tiny and loves to "read" (i.e. memorize and recite books). At this rate, he'll probably learn to read on his own, but I definitely want to make sure he has the tools to successfully tackle difficult and unfamiliar words, so he doesn't self-limit to the stuff he knows well.
    - nice2meetu 4y ago
      That time my daughter proudly announced “look Daddy, I can read this book with my eyes closed”
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I'm in this boat. Every kid is different. My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore. He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31. My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do something else, he did. He's getting there though, and we'll get him there.
dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
>It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.
- joelfried 4y ago
  > There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids. You may not know your child is neurodivergent until you are at or beyond this stage of development.
phoe-krk 4y ago
>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
- tines 4y ago
  For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
  - tivert 4y ago
    > For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right? Yes, exactly. If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons). English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there. * Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji. In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
tivert 4y ago
> It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? > Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. > I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT. Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.
- analog31 4y ago
  Yes. It was called Mcguffey's First Eclectic Reader. After that, the kids books at the public library, which we picked out ourselves. Still in print almost 200 years later.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Not OP, and it definitely isn't an 18th century reader... But "Bob Books" are a homeschool mainstay and a big part of how my kids developed initial reading skills. https://bobbooks.com/ https://bobbooks.com/ They were very interested in books / reading and were pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards. We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.
freeopinion 4y ago
Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way. I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it. As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.
- epiccoleman 4y ago
  Even though it's definitely not sufficient for English spelling, I think it's pretty important to start with phonics. It teaches kids how the alphabet is supposed to work, and to be fair, it does work that way for most of the simple words young readers will encounter. It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of some words are. I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool", "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity", etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son didn't get it.
  - tivert 4y ago
    > It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education. Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.
megmogandog 4y ago
Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.
- housecarpenter 4y ago
  The writing system of English is far more phonetic than logographic writing systems such as that of Chinese. That's the relevant difference here. It is true that English's writing system is one of the least phonetic alphabets, but alphabets are always, by definition, quite phonetic. Most writing systems are alphabetic and not logographic, so if you rank them all ordinally, English is going to have a similar rank to Chinese, but the absolute difference between English and Chinese is quite large. Here is a very impressionistic assignment of percentages of phoneticity to various systems, which will hopefully make clear what I'm getting at: Phoneticity 20% (Chinese) -- -- -- Phoneticity 75% (English) Phoneticity 80% (French) Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing systems)
  - DonaldFisk 4y ago
    You have to distinguish different types of phoneticity. Can you pronounce what you read vs. spell what you hear? Can you pronounce an unfamiliar character? With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.
- slapshot 4y ago
  [flagged]
troupe 4y ago
> Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise. There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized. I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.
- sdwr 4y ago
  Yeah, I see this helpless, "leave it to the experts" attitude in a few places, and absolutely hate it.
  - potta_coffee 4y ago
    It's one of the attitudes being pushed in the education system itself. After a couple of generations, "expertism" has embedded deeply into the American mindset. It's very dangerous to live in a culture where we don't question experts.
    - brookst 4y ago
      This is true, but like so many things America seems to have lost the ability to moderate. For every person who blindly follows "experts", there's someone who insists experts don't know anything at all and any random thought that pops into my head is just as valid as any expert opinion. It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as any expert will tell you.
      - potta_coffee 4y ago
        I wish you were wrong. I've met actual Flat Earth believers, which I find astonishing and disconcerting. Unfortunately, I feel like the over-reaction against expert opinion is part of the cost of prior abuse of expert opinion. Trust in institutions is eroded and in my opinion, for justifiable reasons. We're definitely not in good shape as a society.
YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former? And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"? Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics? I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?
- cjohnson318 4y ago
  From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is" a lot.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French? “Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    Of course but that's not GP's point I think. A kid shall wonder why it's not at the very least "oiso" (when there's one) or "oisos" (when there are several). Or even why not "waso" (with "wa" as in "wapiti"). And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw): https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k
    - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
      Well the discussion is about phonics, so I was thinking of how none of the letters in "oiseaux" are pronounced. That was pointed out to me by a French colleague. Although he stopped at "oiseau", strangely. Anyway I thought it was a common joke of sorts. I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word. Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.
lisper 4y ago
> English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different. Oh, wait...
nice2meetu 4y ago
We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
- rutthenut 4y ago
  >> We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions. Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
  - nice2meetu 4y ago
    Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.
    - siftrics 4y ago
      How could anyone take the advice "don't teach your kids" seriously? Are you insane? It makes no sense on any level. How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.
      - 4y ago
mcv 4y ago
Not every kid learns it automatically, though. My oldest could read before he went to kindergarten (and skipped a grade later), my youngest needed extra help learning to talk. Most kids are somewhere in between those two extremes.
Spooky23 4y ago
IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever method. The remainder need different strategies or more time or both to help. I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October. The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
bradknowles 4y ago
My grandfather sold World Book encyclopedias. He ended up being a regional manager for Fields Enterprises, for World Book. We always had recent editions of the encyclopedia around the house. That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education. By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me. I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.

zaphar 4y ago
Phonics based approaches to reading have been a mainstay of private and home school programs for decades. It creates a silly disparity between those who can afford or are willing to sacrifice enough to put there children through them and those who have to use the public school system. Every once in a while the parents will have enough and revolt somehow. I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there. Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
kritiko 4y ago
The public education system in the US is ~6 hours per day, ~180 days per year. Of course anybody with the means is supplementing that.

jrochkind1 4y ago

On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell. Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading). On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.

tomrod 4y ago
My story reflects yours (I was a "late" reader by grade but also the youngest in my grade, and voracious after I found the world larger than my tiny country town). Because we read with our kids, all of them were reading by late 3/early 4 years old, by their own desire. While none have had a propensity for George Orwell at the third grade, they do read things beyond their age levels. I was lucky, and my kids are lucky. I wonder, are there any organizations that folks can volunteer at to help kids at your and my age in elementary school learn to read?
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  I was not considered a "late" reader at all for the early 80s though, at least where I was -- they just didn't try to teach preschoolers to read then and there like they do now. I think what they do now is a mistake... but that could be my own anecdotal prejudices.
barrkel 4y ago
Starting X early is IMO a bit of a red herring with child development, especially when they're in the low single digits. Their minds grow in power recognizably on a weekly basis (particularly noticeable when you spend a week apart) that an amazing uphill achievement at time t can be a trivially picked up thing at time t+1. I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new books and understands that they contain stories. A household without that is far more likely to cause issues with reading because the motivation will be missing.

bregma 4y ago

We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored. Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.

joelfried 4y ago
We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.
- tivert 4y ago
  >> We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. >> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. > We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge. Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the "whole language" approach people--making the faulty assumption that mere exposure is enough to educate. That works with some, but clearly fails a lot. And even for the kids it works with, I'd be afraid it would leave gaps that would be much better addressed with some explicit instruction. My kid is tiny and loves to "read" (i.e. memorize and recite books). At this rate, he'll probably learn to read on his own, but I definitely want to make sure he has the tools to successfully tackle difficult and unfamiliar words, so he doesn't self-limit to the stuff he knows well.
  - nice2meetu 4y ago
    That time my daughter proudly announced “look Daddy, I can read this book with my eyes closed”
- doubled112 4y ago
  I'm in this boat. Every kid is different. My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore. He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31. My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do something else, he did. He's getting there though, and we'll get him there.

dennis_jeeves1 4y ago

>It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.

joelfried 4y ago
> There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids. You may not know your child is neurodivergent until you are at or beyond this stage of development.

phoe-krk 4y ago

>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

tines 4y ago
For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?
- tivert 4y ago
  > For an alphabet to be phonetic...just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right? Yes, exactly. If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons). English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there. * Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji. In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.

tivert 4y ago

> It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? > Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. > I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT. Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.

analog31 4y ago
Yes. It was called Mcguffey's First Eclectic Reader. After that, the kids books at the public library, which we picked out ourselves. Still in print almost 200 years later.
mlyle 4y ago
Not OP, and it definitely isn't an 18th century reader... But "Bob Books" are a homeschool mainstay and a big part of how my kids developed initial reading skills. https://bobbooks.com/ https://bobbooks.com/ They were very interested in books / reading and were pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards. We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.

freeopinion 4y ago

Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way. I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it. As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.

epiccoleman 4y ago
Even though it's definitely not sufficient for English spelling, I think it's pretty important to start with phonics. It teaches kids how the alphabet is supposed to work, and to be fair, it does work that way for most of the simple words young readers will encounter. It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of some words are. I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool", "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity", etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son didn't get it.
- tivert 4y ago
  > It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education. Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.

megmogandog 4y ago

Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.

housecarpenter 4y ago
The writing system of English is far more phonetic than logographic writing systems such as that of Chinese. That's the relevant difference here. It is true that English's writing system is one of the least phonetic alphabets, but alphabets are always, by definition, quite phonetic. Most writing systems are alphabetic and not logographic, so if you rank them all ordinally, English is going to have a similar rank to Chinese, but the absolute difference between English and Chinese is quite large. Here is a very impressionistic assignment of percentages of phoneticity to various systems, which will hopefully make clear what I'm getting at: Phoneticity 20% (Chinese) -- -- -- Phoneticity 75% (English) Phoneticity 80% (French) Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing systems)
- DonaldFisk 4y ago
  You have to distinguish different types of phoneticity. Can you pronounce what you read vs. spell what you hear? Can you pronounce an unfamiliar character? With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.
slapshot 4y ago
[flagged]

troupe 4y ago

> Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise. There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized. I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.

sdwr 4y ago
Yeah, I see this helpless, "leave it to the experts" attitude in a few places, and absolutely hate it.
- potta_coffee 4y ago
  It's one of the attitudes being pushed in the education system itself. After a couple of generations, "expertism" has embedded deeply into the American mindset. It's very dangerous to live in a culture where we don't question experts.
  - brookst 4y ago
    This is true, but like so many things America seems to have lost the ability to moderate. For every person who blindly follows "experts", there's someone who insists experts don't know anything at all and any random thought that pops into my head is just as valid as any expert opinion. It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as any expert will tell you.
    - potta_coffee 4y ago
      I wish you were wrong. I've met actual Flat Earth believers, which I find astonishing and disconcerting. Unfortunately, I feel like the over-reaction against expert opinion is part of the cost of prior abuse of expert opinion. Trust in institutions is eroded and in my opinion, for justifiable reasons. We're definitely not in good shape as a society.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former? And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"? Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics? I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?

cjohnson318 4y ago
From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is" a lot.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French? “Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Of course but that's not GP's point I think. A kid shall wonder why it's not at the very least "oiso" (when there's one) or "oisos" (when there are several). Or even why not "waso" (with "wa" as in "wapiti"). And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw): https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k https://youtu.be/qmsbP13xu6k
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Well the discussion is about phonics, so I was thinking of how none of the letters in "oiseaux" are pronounced. That was pointed out to me by a French colleague. Although he stopped at "oiseau", strangely. Anyway I thought it was a common joke of sorts. I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word. Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.

lisper 4y ago

> English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different. Oh, wait...

nice2meetu 4y ago

We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.

rutthenut 4y ago
>> We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions. Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
- nice2meetu 4y ago
  Reading back what I wrote, yes, we never took this as a warning not to let them learn at all! I think the intention was more that there is less incentive to actively push or pressure kids in to reading before school, and that actively trying to teach them one methodology might even conflict with the method they end up being taught in school. That parents try to "get their kids ready for school" by getting them to read before starting, and that doing so is unnecessary. That is how we took it.
  - siftrics 4y ago
    How could anyone take the advice "don't teach your kids" seriously? Are you insane? It makes no sense on any level. How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.
    - 4y ago

mcv 4y ago

Not every kid learns it automatically, though. My oldest could read before he went to kindergarten (and skipped a grade later), my youngest needed extra help learning to talk. Most kids are somewhere in between those two extremes.

Spooky23 4y ago

IIRC, about 65% of children just learn to read with whatever method. The remainder need different strategies or more time or both to help. I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October. The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!

bradknowles 4y ago

My grandfather sold World Book encyclopedias. He ended up being a regional manager for Fields Enterprises, for World Book. We always had recent editions of the encyclopedia around the house. That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education. By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me. I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.