English spelling does not provide you with the basic information you need to accurately figure out the correct sound of an English word
This is the reason why English is unnecessarily hard to read
Fonetic English makes English so much easier to learn because it provides you with ALL THE INFORMATION you need to quickly and intuitively figure out the correct sound of ANY English word
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.
CON.tract means an agreement
Con.TRACT means to get shorter
a. The digraph “\\”. There is no English character for the sound “oo” in “foot” or “u” in “put”, so we added the digraph “\\” which makes this sound, so “f\\t” and “too” can be easily distinguished.
b. The digraph “th” indicates it is unvoiced (three) and the digraph “tң” indicates it is voiced (that)
- 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.
Random information is hard to remember. Can you remember these characters?
r g o d n a
These letters are random, and we humans are not good at remembering random information.
However, we humans are very good at recognizing and remembering things that make sense. Here are these letters in a different order.
“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.
The colour of the snake is the same as the background, so it is the shape of the camouflaged snake that we can recognize. And we can recognize camouflaged snakes in all sorts of different positions. This is an amazing skill we humans have evolved.
So, once you can recognize the shape of a word, you can use our evolved predator recognition skill to read that word no matter how the word is written. It can be printed normally, can be in a curly type, can be printed badly or the letters can be handwritten, and we can still recognize it by its shape.
In fact, being able to recognize disguised words is how we can prȷve to some websites that we are humans, not com—pů–ters.
As the shape and spelling of a word does not change when marked up into Fonetic English, you can read a word shape in both Fonetic English and in standard English. So, there is an automatic transition from reading in Fonetic English to reading in standard English.
