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How I Taught My Kid to Read

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Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#161

Post by wisty »

hutzlibu wrote: post #150
wisty wrote: post #58

Phonics will always be unpopular with teachers for at least 3 reasons. 1. Teachers are typically from good middle-class backgrounds, and will naturally assume children will just learn to read because their parents basically tutored them for hundreds or thousands of hours and they just magically taught themselves. 2. It's hard for an individual practitioner to have any idea whether their methods are wonderful or absol…

Well, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are effective or not. As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are individuals, but usual still average. So you could experiment. In real life you probably can't as (at least in germany) it is pretty strict and fixed what is about to be teached in class, when and how. That kills all creativity and creates boredom in the teacher and his class.

> Well, a good teacher could (and can) indeed see, what methods he use are effective or not.

Any evidence?

Doctors could figure out that not washing hands was killing patients, but didn't.

> As he gets new data with new "fresh" kids who are individuals, but usual still average. So you could experiment.

There will always be multiple things a teacher does differently so it will be, in practice, impossible to attribute success or failure to any particular practices. That's aside from random noise (which might be more systematic - what if some random good / bad kid happens to have a large influence on the whole class?).

Remember how Skinner proved pigeons could develop superstitions? Or look at any other profession that deals with a little bit of randomness (human factors / biology) and see the stupid stuff they used to believe.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#162

Post by spraak »

woodandsteel wrote: post #159
spraak wrote: post #16

We do a free schooling approach. My daughter speaks 3 languages and learned to read all 3 simultaneously on her own* once she was ready (around 9). I felt a lot of pressure from everyone (family, friends, etc.) to teach her earlier, but now she reads just as well as her peers, and most of her peers/friends only speak/read one language. *literally on her own in that one day she wanted to learn to read, so we got a sta…

I don't know much about home schooling (I assume that's what you mean by free schooling). It seems to me that it could work well for some cases. But most parents couldn't survive economically with one parent not working (and what about single parents). Also most parents don't know enough academically to be able to do it well, and most students are not as smart as I am guessing your daughter is. So if your goal is to…

Check out the book I mentioned, Summerhill by AS Neill for how it could work at scale. We do it ourselves because there is no analogy to Summerhill where we live, so I agree with you in that regard

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#163

Post by dang »

sudosteph wrote: post #149
dang wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please omit personal swipes from your posts to HN? Providing correct information neutrally is by far the best way to get it across, and then you won't be breaking the site guidelines or damaging the community either. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Was the comment above edited or something? Because I don't get how it's interpreted as a personal swipe as is. That the parent comment would make such sweeping statement and dismiss regional accents as "untreated speech problems" is incredibly offensive, and in fact does indicate that they have not done much study on linguistics. Literally the first chapter of a Linguistics 101 book explains how dialects are a natura…

"You are betraying your ignorance" makes the discussion personal and expresses a pejorative. That's what I mean by personal swipe. Even if another comment was bad and provocative, the guidelines ask you to omit those. The issue isn't whether the other commenter deserved it—it's the effect that including such things has on subsequent discussion. We know from long experience that the effect is degrading, whether someone deserved it or not.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#164

Post by sandworm101 »

Vrondi wrote: post #109
JTon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.) I had a hard time believing this one. It's subtle to my ears, but I'm a believer now. For those who are curious, check out the clip below [1]. You'll hear "hunting" & "willing" shortly after the linked time [1] https://youtu.be/kngB7PzsDzM?t=48

Nope, there is no second "g" sound in the clip you linked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGjQFgGrBXs

Brian cox is one of the most pronounced. Listen to how he says "big bang-g" at 02:55. With him is is almost like "big bang-[cough]", the extra G being almost an extra syllable.

Or at 6:55 when he says "our universe is expanding-g".

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#165

Post by burfog »

sandworm101 wrote: post #164
Vrondi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, there is no second "g" sound in the clip you linked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGjQFgGrBXs Brian cox is one of the most pronounced. Listen to how he says "big bang-g" at 02:55. With him is is almost like "big bang-[cough]", the extra G being almost an extra syllable. Or at 6:55 when he says "our universe is expanding-g".

At 2:55 it is a normal g. There is just one. Maybe an extra is generated in your mind, as would be needed to correct the error of dropping it, and then you hear it properly pronounced and count that as a second one.

At 6:55 there is something extra, but I don't think it is a g being pronounced. Note that the same word, at 6:51, is lacking that extra sound. It may be an audio glitch or related to a breath he is taking.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#166

Post by a-saleh »

gowld wrote: post #135
a-saleh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't envy native english readers, as my teacher said, "I wouldn't be surprised if one day English write Manchester and read Liverpool". I am not sure of all Slavic languages work best with phonics, but one I learned seems it does. Like if you just read the sound of each letter fast after the other, you are 80% saying the word :)

Isn't that how Arabic and Chinese work? Vastly different spoken languages for the same writing? Chinese at least does, but of course they don't even pretend to have phonics, where English is on the fence.

Well, with Arabic writing you are not supposed to write wowels, so when I attempted to learn it, I mostly read the shape of words at once. But I didn't really get beyond 'This is Rami and that is his book' :)

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#167

Post by frobozz »

kingofpandora wrote: post #93
helloguillecl wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But they are very few and consistent rules. The sound of "H" will be consistent, unless it is actually a "CH", which is another letter phonetically speaking (some dictionaries would treat it a a separate letter).

England has rules - albeit not simple ones - such that about 85% (IIRC) of never before seen words can be pronounced correctly. Obviously I'm paraphrasing someone else's study here and may be getting it slightly wrong but the gist is that English is more decipherable than it first appears.

I like that you use the word albeit in that comment. It's one of the words where the pronunciation rules go awry.

No one is denying that English has rules mapping spelling to pronunciation for the lion's share of text. It's just that the rules are (as you say) complex and there are a lot of exceptions.

On the production side, there are a number of different opshuns for righting the seim sownds, sum ov witch are legitimate homophones, rather than just misspellings.

In languages like Spanish (or even better, Welsh, where sandhi is actually written down), as long as you know the rules, you can correctly pronounce 100% of never before seen words, and you can correctly spell a higher proportion of words than in English.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#168

Post by burfog »

sudosteph wrote: post #149
dang wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please omit personal swipes from your posts to HN? Providing correct information neutrally is by far the best way to get it across, and then you won't be breaking the site guidelines or damaging the community either. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Was the comment above edited or something? Because I don't get how it's interpreted as a personal swipe as is. That the parent comment would make such sweeping statement and dismiss regional accents as "untreated speech problems" is incredibly offensive, and in fact does indicate that they have not done much study on linguistics. Literally the first chapter of a Linguistics 101 book explains how dialects are a natura…

Disagreement is not ignorance. The fact that a Linguistics 101 book contains a politically motivated viewpoint is unsurprising. That viewpoint is not factual.

I have a relative who drops the R. He was raised around people (family and city) without that error, so clearly it didn't come about due to accent or dialect. Well, he invented his own, which is what a speech problem is. He was thus taken to speech therapy. Sadly the problem was not easy to fix. The speech therapist told his mother to not worry too much, because he sounded like he came from Boston.

It does impact communication ability. Nearly everybody can clearly understand the speech of the national news anchors, particularly those of the 1970s and 1980s. Just the other day I met somebody with a thick native Florida accent, and communication was impeded. This matters.

Getting back to reading, the more your speech differs from simple phonetics the more trouble you will have. Typical Russians learn to read a year or two before typical English speakers, and typical English speakers learn to read a year or two before typical Chinese speakers. If your speech is far from phonetic, your situation is closer to Chinese. That delays reading.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#169

Post by andrei_says_ »

laumars wrote: post #155
andrei_says_ wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the conversation but don’t have the bandwidth to engage your points. If you’d like to explore the research, check out the resources I mentioned. It’s possible you’ll arrive at a different opinions... different from mine but also maybe different from your current ones. I dislike the dismissive + condescending label you try to attach to someone you haven’t really met. Labeling while effective, is not clean…

> I dislike the dismissive + condescending label you try to attach to someone you haven’t really met. Labeling while effective, is not clean argument. You need to read back this discussion because I've been anything but dismissive and condescending while you have been using language like "condescending", "humiliating", "degrading" and "dismissive" throughout. In fact if you do read it back you'd also realise that I'm…

> You're being a tad over dramatic :)

You don’t know me, and trying to frame me as something or other is a technique to dismiss my statements. Ad hominem is not an argument, although it works because human brains are vulnerable to fallacies.

If you are curious about why I used strong words you may ask :)

And, I appreciate the conversation and your clarification.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#170

Post by mattrp »

We've used Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons with 4 of our 5 children (the 5th is 2 years old). Starting at 3, they generally completed the book by 4-4.5, one took until he was 5. After they finish the book, the authors have a list of recommended books for the kids to read next. It's a good list, but one other source we added were travel brochures. Anytime we stopped somewhere on a family trip, we'd load up on all the brochures of things to do in the area. My 9 year old is the oldest of the group, she's completed the Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House Series each multiple times. Our 8 year old just finished reading the "Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" and just asked me for 100 feet of copper wire....our 6 year old wants to go to Round Rock, TX - his favorite brochure and our 3 year old is on lesson 40... if it were just one kid, I'd say it was just luck. But the book really works. And each lesson takes between 10-15 minutes. If you figure over the course of a year, you're spending roughly 25-40 hours on developing an independent reader, it's a no-brainer.
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