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I heard schools have largely moved away from Phonics, which is wild to me. That’s basically how reading was taught going back to at least medieval monks.

I hear they’re using a “look and see” method or something? Word is that its how the Chinese teach their students to read…but they don’t have an alphabet, so I don’t know how that’s supposed to work in English.

I have a relative who just retired from teaching and she says its a real mess in early education because of how badly this reading teaching method works, and its only worsening as students mature.

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Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There was a “program” that had been gaining popularity for years, put out by what are effectively scammers that denounced phonics for “sight reading” where kids were basically asked to guess what words were when next to pictures. This has largely been rejected and phonics reimplemented as it was a disaster

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bigfondue@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The Chinese do have a Roman alphabet called pinyin for educational purposes. It’s very consistent phonetically.

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Dreaming_Novaling@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Eng Learning TLDR: I was raised with both sight words and phonetics, and realize that my gen was fucked over.

I’ve heard about the reading wars, but this was the first time I actually thought about it with my education, and I realize why I probably wouldn’t read as well if I didn’t have parents who actively read with me as a child.

I’m a 2006 baby, so I guess my elementary years were at the perfect time for this little debate to occur. I definitely remember doing sight words and their flashcards, but I swear we still did phonetics (thank god). But like, how would anyone expect a kid to magically learn words by just looking at it 50 times and hearing a teacher say that word? I get that according to this article, a large portion of Eng words can’t be read properly first try, but still, I see the value in having a kid connect the sounds of “cat, bat, hat, that,” etc. Yes, some homonyms like “to, too, two” are gonna have to be “sight words” but that’s unavoidable.

I hated Eng class, not because of sucking at it, but how we never really got free reading time after elementary, and that we were doing lame ass journals and reports on books I didn’t want to read. And there were high levels books I did want to read, which is why I loved a banned books project that gave us the freedom to pick a book to do a creative, in any format you want, presentation of the knowledge from the book.

So if I, a person who actually wanted to read and can read well hated Eng class, then people who have learning disabilities, are simply bored, didn’t have parents who cared, etc were cooked. I guess that’s why my college classmates are so incompetent rn…

Also side note about Chinese (or well, Japanese in my case):

Yeah, CN and JP use hanzi/kanji respectively, which are logograms, but both CN/JP have “alphabets” that can be used to tell you the reading of a word. Chinese uses pinyin (which is actually what most of their keyboards are based on I think), and JP has hiragana/katakana. It’s still however more useful to learn the readings for these characters in the context of what you’re reading (esp. Japanese, they got their writing system from China but used their own bastardized readings for words, so 生 has like 10+ readings depending on the word it’s paired with).

But they still have a neat trick in which kanji have two parts, the phonetic component, and the meaning component. Kanji are made of radicals, which is like using lego blocks to make a single character (i.e. 米 + 青 = 精). The neat part is that you can potentially guess the reading of a word if you already know that phonetic components reading. 青 can be read as “sei”, and these kanji 精, 清, 圊, 睛, etc. all have “sei” or a similar version as a potential reading. Now sometimes the radicals don’t always make sense meaning wise when added together. 青 is “blue/youth” and 米 is “rice”, but 精 means “spirit/ghost”, “energy”, and uh… “semen” (mostly in the word 精液 “spirit fluid”). Why rice + youth = spirit or ghost, is beyond me, but these kanji usually have interesting stories behind them that could potentially explain their reasoning.

JP Kanji Learning TLDR: JP is fun to learn and kanji have reading patterns based on their components.

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- nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  LeVar Burton put out a documentary recently on the topic called “The Right to Read”.
  
  Also, yeah, I’ve gotta give Japanese a proper go at some point. The characters look really interesting to learn.
  
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- DahGangalang@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, most of my knowledge on “Chinese” is from when i tried to learn Korean. Korean still lean on some Chinese characters (hanja?). Not for like “daily” reading/writing, but like, I remember newspaper articles would sometimes have the headlines in Chinese characters. They, of course, would use their Korean pronunciations, but there was no way to tell what that was from the character (unlike the rest of the Korean writing system, which uses an almost completely consistent phonetic alphabet).
  
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