Albanian, my mother tongue, is such a language. In first grade it took me all of 4 months to learn how to read and write everything. But that didn't mean I was

Albanian, my mother tongue, is such a language. In first grade it took me all of 4 months to learn how to read and write everything. But that didn't mean I was reading everything. In fact I read my first book when I was in second grade and was reading independently only in fourth grade. One needs to practice reading to be able to read. Spelling also is not trivial. There is a one to one correspondence between sounds and letters, yes, but before you can write the word you need to figure out all the sounds that make up that word and that is not trivial at all. Again from my experience, we were taking dictations until second year of high schools and we were still making mistakes. I think that grammar actually plays a more important role in writing ability, at least when comparing Albanian and English. A verb in Albanian can appear in more than 70 different forms depending on the tense and other grammatical categories that I can't even translate, while a verb in English can appear in a very limited number of forms. I think it is much easier in English to remember by heart how to write those few forms than in Albanian to figure out how to write each form by sounding it. Of course an Albanian can predict how a verb should be written from the context (there are rules) but that cannot be done before having studied Albanian grammar for a few years.