> Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages... Sure, a language like Tu

> Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages... Sure, a language like Turkish (29 characters, 29 sounds) will be more phonetic, but English's eccentricities are overstated, with most boiling down to "unstressed vowels get shortened, shwa-ed, or skipped". Once you clear the first 50 or so words by frequency, it gets pretty sound-it-out for a good long time before you start hitting weird loan words.