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ToggleA simple lack of information makes English unnecessarily hard to learn

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A lack of information makes English unnecessarily hard to learn
You can’t learn the sound of many English words by sounding them out.
English words can make literally thousands of sounds.





What information is English missing?

You need to know exactly what sound each character makes in a word. The problem is that English has 42 characters and 26 letters, so many letters must make more than 1 sound. “u” has 7 sounds: up (its usual sound) and busy, quick, bury, fruit, use, and put.

You need to know which letters are silent: the letter “g” is pronounced in the word “signature” but not in “sign”.

You need to know where the syllable breaks in a word are: baked (1 syllable) and naked (2 syllables)

And you need to know which syllable is stressed:
CON.tract means an agreement
Con.TRACT means to get shorter



- In Roman times, everyone read aloud. When French monks added upper- and lower-case letters, spaces and punctuation in the 8th and 9th centuries, people started to read silently.
- Silent reading repurposes the speech and auditory part of the brain. Unsurprisingly this auditory part of the brain operates most efficiently at the speed of conversational speech. Reading at the speed of conversational speech is called fluent reading. Fluent readers have better comprehension and learning outcomes than slower readers.
- Fluent reading at conversational speed does not give you time to decode the sound of a word by sounding it out: you must be able to recognize the shape of the word and instantly know its sound, which is called sightword recognition.


“dragon” is easy to remember because it makes sense to us!
Phonetic languages allow you to sound out words letter by letter with no rules or exceptions. The decoded sound makes sense. Because we humans have evolved to remember what makes sense, we can easily remember it, as we saw with the word “dragon”.
Many of you can learn a sightword by sounding out the word letter by letter as few as 3-5 times. That may be all the repetition required for you to remember the shape of a phonetic word and its sound.
Most of you will sound out new Fonetic English words correctly and you won’t have to unlearn mispronunciation to learn the correct sound, which is the fossilization problem.
With non phonetic words, the sound is much more random information which humans are very poor at remembering as we saw with the letters “r g o d n a”. It can take 20-50 repetitions to learn a non phonetic word by rote.
Maybe this is why reading levels are not improving: fewer students are prepared to endure what can feel like endless repetition to learn sightwords by rote.

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