4 ms·

Yeah, I’d certainly say “in” isn’t somehow difficult to sound out, though “the” is a bit weird and not necessarily intuitive (plus we don’t always pronounce it

Yeah, I’d certainly say “in” isn’t somehow difficult to sound out, though “the” is a bit weird and not necessarily intuitive (plus we don’t always pronounce it the same way)

WalterBright 3y ago
If you sound out "t" and "h" quickly, it slushes into to the "th" sound. Besides, there's nothing wrong with teaching that "th" has its own sound, just like "ng" has its own sound.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  That’s exactly what they do—I think they call that a “blend” (I’m not a teacher, I just know lots of them) when they’re teaching phonics, and they don’t try to do some insane thing like treating the two letters as meaningfully separate, but teach them as a unit that makes one sound. It’s what to do with the “e” that’s a bit tough to guess, I should think—and that’s not consistent, at least in American English, because we’ll say it like “thuh” or “thee” depending on context. “Thus” without the S, or “these” without the SE.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    People hear "the" so often I can't believe the kids have a problem with pronouncing the "e".
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      It’s more that it’s not a word you can rely on them to sound out, if they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. And, anyway, not all “sight words” are difficult to sound out—it’s a kind of loose category of short words that occur so often that you must not need to sound them out to recognize them if you’re going to read fluently. Of course any successfully reader will accumulate even more words that they recognize at a glance (that’s why the “jumble all but the first and last letter” trick works—fluent readers rarely need to sound out words, and don’t really look at every letter, so they can still read texts so-jumbled with little difficulty) but sight words are taught that way explicitly, from early on, almost like learning the alphabet. They do know what “the” sounds like, spoken, they just might not be able to figure out that “the” represents that sound (or may struggle with it longer than you’d expect). Other sight words are very straightforward, but lots are subtly tricky for early readers (“of”—that’s gotta be the word “off”, right? The sound the same letters make in “often”, surely? But no.)
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        I'm sorry, I just cannot fathom anyone having trouble sounding out "the" and recognizing the result.
        hotnfresh 3y ago
        Early readers will often attempt several sounding-outs of a word, out loud, one of them correct, and fail to recognize that they have just spoken aloud a word that they know. Sometimes they’ll do it when it’s the only attempt they make. They just won’t process the sound the same when they’re sounding the word out, as they do when they say or hear the word naturally. “Hooking up” those two parts of the brain, if you will, is part of how you get them to be good at sounding out words (aside from memorizing the various sounds letters and letter-combos might make) and usually just comes to them as they practice more.

Yeah, I’d certainly say “in” isn’t somehow difficult to sound out, though “the” is a bit weird and not necessarily intuitive (plus we don’t always pronounce it the same way)

WalterBright 3y ago

If you sound out "t" and "h" quickly, it slushes into to the "th" sound. Besides, there's nothing wrong with teaching that "th" has its own sound, just like "ng" has its own sound.

hotnfresh 3y ago
That’s exactly what they do—I think they call that a “blend” (I’m not a teacher, I just know lots of them) when they’re teaching phonics, and they don’t try to do some insane thing like treating the two letters as meaningfully separate, but teach them as a unit that makes one sound. It’s what to do with the “e” that’s a bit tough to guess, I should think—and that’s not consistent, at least in American English, because we’ll say it like “thuh” or “thee” depending on context. “Thus” without the S, or “these” without the SE.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  People hear "the" so often I can't believe the kids have a problem with pronouncing the "e".
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    It’s more that it’s not a word you can rely on them to sound out, if they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. And, anyway, not all “sight words” are difficult to sound out—it’s a kind of loose category of short words that occur so often that you must not need to sound them out to recognize them if you’re going to read fluently. Of course any successfully reader will accumulate even more words that they recognize at a glance (that’s why the “jumble all but the first and last letter” trick works—fluent readers rarely need to sound out words, and don’t really look at every letter, so they can still read texts so-jumbled with little difficulty) but sight words are taught that way explicitly, from early on, almost like learning the alphabet. They do know what “the” sounds like, spoken, they just might not be able to figure out that “the” represents that sound (or may struggle with it longer than you’d expect). Other sight words are very straightforward, but lots are subtly tricky for early readers (“of”—that’s gotta be the word “off”, right? The sound the same letters make in “often”, surely? But no.)
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I'm sorry, I just cannot fathom anyone having trouble sounding out "the" and recognizing the result.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        Early readers will often attempt several sounding-outs of a word, out loud, one of them correct, and fail to recognize that they have just spoken aloud a word that they know. Sometimes they’ll do it when it’s the only attempt they make. They just won’t process the sound the same when they’re sounding the word out, as they do when they say or hear the word naturally. “Hooking up” those two parts of the brain, if you will, is part of how you get them to be good at sounding out words (aside from memorizing the various sounds letters and letter-combos might make) and usually just comes to them as they practice more.