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> the additional problem of not wanting to read books that parents would buy for 4-year-old kids.

There are actually a couple of startups that are trying to address this problem.

One is early-stage and is focused on this specifically [1]. Their content is crowdsourced via student writing competitions.

The other startup is very well-funded and uses a team of editors to ratchet down the vocabulary and sentence structure of news articles, which they provide at several reading levels [2].

1: https://www.storyshares.org/books

2: http://www.newsela.com

As a native Spanish-speaker I'm astonished to learn that phonics is not the only way to teach reading in English. It makes sense, since phonics are way more difficult to follow in English than in Spanish (written Spanish maps 1-to-1 to the phonetics)

I know a little Spanish still I would argue about 1-to-1: at least you do not pronounce `h` and there are two different ways to pronounce `g`.

Yes, there are variations on sounds, but none of the through/enough bullshit english has.

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.

There are so many words in your second sentence that belie your point that it almost seems like you wrote it that way.

Compared to English, I think it's reasonable to unscientifically call it 1:1.

Spanish is at least 0.98:1. English probably struggles to reach the 60's.

From what i understand the 'g' pronunciation is entirely dependent on the vowel following in, in a completely regular manner. So still a lot better than English.

Mostly true. At the end of a word it's pronounced as though it were followed by an 'e' or an 'i'.

I used to work with a guy named Gerardo Ochoa. His username was gochoa, but when addressing him in person we'd sometimes call him "jochoa." (Not his real name or username, but what I'm describing is true in its essence.)

Also 'x' is a little weird. Depending on the dialect and the word, it's pronounced roughly like English 'x', 's', 'sh', and a guttural 'h'.

AFAIK, neither Spanish, nor Italian (my native language) maps 1:1. The concept you are referring to is called Phonemic Ortography [0].

And let me add, it's a common mistake by Italians and Spanish and Japanese native speakers to think that their own language phonetics maps 1:1 with written.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography

Japanese is pretty close to 1:1 mapping if you write using Hiragana for example. Its not complete since there are some words written the same way to which you give a different intonation, but compared to languages like English or French its WAY more standardized.

I'd challenge any Japanese native who somehow believes this to read any nontrivial roster of names...

>> It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R".

The dropping and adding of consonants is one of the defining aspects of many accents. It isn't really incorrect, just a mode of speech.

Texas: "Readin."

Canada/Nebraska: "Reading."

UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

> 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.

I think it sounds like hunt-in-guh and will-in-guh. Not sure about a "second" g, but there is definitely some kind of emphasis on the final g.

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.

I hear them emphasize the "ing" slightly, but I don't hear a double G at all.

My accent: "-ing" -> /ɪŋ/

Broadcast British: "-ing" -> /ɪŋg/

When I first hear the /ɪŋ/, my transcriber notes it as "ing", but then I hear the /g/, and it appends to get "ingg". When I switch accent modes, that /ŋ/ reads as just "n" instead of "ng", and the problem goes away.

If you do not process audible speech in part by transcribing it back to letter symbols, you will not hear a second "g". It is an illusion. You can determine whether you are such a person by trying to read from a book while someone else talks into your ear. If hearing the speech drastically slows your reading, you will probably also hear a second "g" in the Broadcast British accent.

I think the terminology is confusing people. There may be a ŋ + g, blended together. I guess you could call that "gg" in ASCII, but it's "gg" in the sense of "more than just a lone ŋ or g, or a long sound / mora not in the sense of "gig" or "ŋig"

Huw Edwards is Welsh, from a Welsh speaking family. English is his second language, so I wouldn't put too much stock in his accent being indicative of clipped RP.

> UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

I've listened for this, and can't hear it. Are you saying that after the final ŋ, you hear a g sound? Or that you think the ŋ sound is lengthened?

Every text on English phonetics gives ri:dɪŋ as the RP pronunciation. Here's a transcript containing words ending in "ing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation#Spoken_...

Maybe they mean that the the ŋ sound is hard and sharply cut off?

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 :)

Serbian is a slavic language with 100% letter for letter pronunciation. You can probably learn to read in Serbian in 30 mins and impress your friends. Understanding it is another matter :)

I agree with this, however to be pedantic even in Serbian (or BCS more generally) there are some homographs (in ordinary orthography at least) which are not complete homophones - the classic example being grâd "city" / gràd "hail". It's definitely not ghoti though ;)

No, you still actually need to properly learn the language. Just reading the letters out loud will make you miss the word accents/stress, at the very least you'll sounds wrong, at worst you'll mix up words.

Russian is even harder, as accent can change the sound a letter makes - e.g. unstressed "o" is pronounced as "a".

That's regional accent. In Moscow it would be like that, but in other parts unstressed "a" would be pronounced more like "o" instead.

The thing that impresses me about this is that this was achieved intentionally, possibly spearheaded by Vuk Karadžić [1] and continued by others [2] - at least that's what they drilled us on in grade school back home. When we had a choice to write down English (or any foreign) words we could write it down in source form or "po Vuku" - "by the Wolf" - where we would write down the sounds in the pronounced word. It was almost like writing in the international phonetic alphabet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Vukovians

I can't resist linking this video: https://youtu.be/A8zWWp0akUU "What if English were phonetically consistent"

Gallagher used to do this as part of his routine. Second half of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

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' :)

> not wanting to read books that parents would buy for 4-year-old kids

Similarly, children's books can be great for learning a foreign language, except that they're children's books. It's hard to find simple language books to practice with.

Children's books are usually horrible for learning foreign language. They're full of all sorts of cutesy bullshit that's really strange. Some children's books aren't but if you read a lot of them you find they actually often contain quite bizarre language and scenarios.

They're fine if you can sample a large number at the library to find ones that currently work for you. It'd be an inefficient strategy ordering from, say, Amazon, before around the Harry Potter level.

Maybe this is why The Little Prince is the most translated book outside the Bible. It's a children's book, and it uses relatively simple language, but it has a story and theme that even adults find profound.

Not really. They're boring for adults and the language can be highly idiomatic. You're better off watching films with subtitles in your target language.

Depends on the book. My kids (4 and 6) enjoy a lot of books that are full of puns that I catch as an adult that my kids don't get at all. They get a very different story than me or my wife, but the result is we can all enjoy it - if for different reasons.

> It is common to fail to distinguish running from run-in, or pin from pen.

The pin-pen merger is a reality for millions of people all over the country, and we are understanding each other and everyone else just fine.

Check the map: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/maps/Map3.html

Also, as a person who actually had years of speech therapy despite a very early mastery of reading, it's honestly a bit offensive to see you conflating the two subjects here. Mutual misunderstandings while reading between two people who each speak different dialects is not a form of speech pathology. Teaching someone else your dialect through reading with them does not correct genuine speech pathology either.

I don't get your examples. babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub, bye, boo, bah all have the same B sound.

It isn't like 'ate' and 'apple'.

Or are you saying they will literally think B is 'buh'? But then any one of those examples will disabuse them of that idea???

The point is giving examples of "b" with each vowel, so the child does not associate "b" with any particular sound.

>Or are you saying they will literally think B is 'buh'? But then any one of those examples will disabuse them of that idea?

Unfortunately, the fact that English has any number of vowel sounds depending on accent, dialect and even formal register makes it less intuitive to teach consonant sounds based on syllables. Even worse is the fact that consonants themselves may express different sounds in ways that would seem arbitrary to a child (e.g. "Ti" in "tiger" vs "attention").

In contrast, Spanish has a closed set of five vowel sounds, so every consonant can be exhaustively expressed in five digraphs/syllables: Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu – and that's the way children are usually taught. Things can get a bit more complicated when spelling particular sounds (e.g. the hard "G": Ga, Gue, Gui, Go, Gu) but the rules are always followed consistently.

Try making a pure "b" sound without any vowel sound. You can't really, as you end up making an aspirated vowel sound to make any sound at all.. So we often tell kids that "b" is pronounced like "buh," for example. The point is to tell them "b" with other vowel sounds so they don't associate it with only one.

"B" is buh, bee, boh, boo, bah, bay, beh, bih.

It's possible to make a 'b' with no vowel. Start with the sound and never open your mouth. It's like an 'm' without letting any air out your nose. Hold it and your cheeks will swell, there's no place to release the air. You can do a tiny release and have no voice at that point.

But I still agree with you overall that the correct approach is to teach it by demonstrating what's common across all its uses.

What words do New Englanders add and remove Rs in?

Note: I don't agree with the above poster's "speech therapy" comments at all and I'm assuming this question was asked in good faith (which can be a mistake)...

This kind of drop accent happens in all sorts of languages for what it's worth including Dutch (drop the 'N' at the end of things like Leiden and verb conjugation) as well as Spanish (Puerto Rican dialects) so

But for New England, I'd say it's mostly the lahng Ah that gets ya. (that's the long R). It's more common to drop whenever a word contains an "AR" sound. The classic example being: "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd"

But sometimes it's added: Examples: Draw(r), Idea(r)

First, there is the dialect feature known as a "Linking R" (which usually happens in dialects where people don't pronounce the "r" at the end of words by default).

In this video, you can hear JFK saying "eleven billion dollah" then a few sentences later, he says "eleven billion dollars", because the word is follwed by an "i". So, his accent drops a lot of "r" sounds by default, but inserts them back in if the following word begins with a vowel. https://youtu.be/bOGWTEgta_w?t=52

So there is a perfectly articulate, quite educated man, who is making "non-standard" usage that is quite correct in his own dialect.

Another example is where people would typically say the word "car" as "cah", for example. "Pahk the cah." However, if the next word begins in a vowel sound, these same people will suddenly pronounce the "r" at the end of the word. The same person would say "pahk the car in the yahd", because the word after "car" begins in a vowel sound.

There is also the "Intrusive R" where people add a "r" sound to words wholesale (instead of merely pronouncing an "r" that was already there, which they were dropping before). You often hear this if the following word also begins with a vowel. You can hear this when people say things like "idear" instead of "idea". Here's a British gent talking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpX8NZMxp9Q

This happens in certain parts of New England, Britain, and Australia. In the USA, while some in New England are laughing at Southerners for their exaggerated vowels, the Southerners are laughing at the New-Englanders for their crazy "r" sounds.

Human dialect is fascinating.

You are betraying your ignorance of linguistics and dialect by viewing regional accents as defects requiring speech therapy. If children are taught to read by instructors who share their accent, such things are not even noticed at all. The child smoothly learns to read well. They do not sound like a flattened-accent Mid-west TV announcer, but they learn to read quite well.

"Linking R" and "Instrusive R" in New England or exaggerated dipthonged vowels in the Southern Mountain dialect are equally "correct" to anything anywhere else in the country. Any educator who claims otherwise is simply displaying a deep ignorance of language, phonetics, and dialect.

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 natural and healthy part of language and the existence of a dialect is not relative to someone's communication ability overall. As a person who had actual speech problems that required years of speech therapy - it's incredibly frustrating to see someone try to equate learning to read with speech therapy and then see you say that it's a "personal swipe" when that person is correctly called out as ignorant on the specific subject matter it relates to.

"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.

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.

You can, in contrast, say a "p" in isolation, as it is the unvoiced consonant. But the English "p" is actually two sounds-- there's the lips-puffing-air sound, and the lips-stopping-air sound. The same letter is used for both, because context allows them to be coded correctly (subject to accents). Usually, the puff is at the start of a syllable, and either one can be at the end. This is one case where the teacher might not be able to distinguish the two sounds, but the student might be able to recognize them as different, because they don't already have the association that they are both represented by the same letter in English.

"B" is the voiced equivalent, but as voicing comes from the larynx and not the lips, you need an additional symbol to characterize that part of the sound. In that sense, "b" is the combining symbol for "p" and an adjacent voiced sound.

This is why Greek codes English "b" sounds as "μπ". Their "β" is more like partway between "v" and "b" than an English "b". Doing this language hack leaves a mark, so if your name starts with a hard "b", you might be able to detect a native Greek speaker still voicing an "m" before your name, or mispronouncing a "b" in your name as an almost v-like beta. I'd be "Log from Mblammo", for instance, and you might be "Mburfog". If someone teaches the phonics incorrectly, it might leave a similar residue in the student's speech.

Since "b" is not an atomic mouth sound, I wouldn't teach it before "p". I'd introduce it with other voice-added sounds, and use whispering and yelling (for some reason, my kids thought it was fun to yell) or normally-voiced speech to help tell the difference. Like when you whisper "cup" and "cub", they sound the same, but when you yell them, they are different. The "p" stops the voicing at the letter boundary; the "b" lets it bleed through from either side. That's why the "b" can't be by itself--a lone "b" is just a whispered "b", which is actually a "p".

Practice voicing boundaries with "pop", "bop", "pub", "bub", "tot", "dot", "tad", "dad", etc. It might also help reinforce that the written symbols are encoded speech sounds, and that means they have to describe what the lips, tongue, cheeks, jaw, and larynx are doing.

And you might as well tell the student that accents happen when some of the encoding rules get changed. Play a video of someone with a tough-to-understand accent speaking, have the student read a transcript, and then watch it again. One that immediately leaps to mind as kid-friendly is Merida in "Wreck-It-Ralph 2", who essentially says, "May your hearth stay warm, and your pantry full. Come back soon.", but no one else can understand the dialect. Somewhat less kid-friendly is the scene in "Hot Fuzz" that translates a very Northern accent in multiple progressively less-Northern stages, until it can be understood by someone from London.