Phonics were all the rage when I was learning to read. I'm sure it helped me in some way for a year or two. Then I spent five years unlearning phonics. For the most part, I learned by rote memorization of spelling lists and by figuring out words from context through a lot of individual reading. My children learned from rote memorization and from context. Every English-literate person I know learned this way. Every less-literate person I know did not learn this way.

I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.

As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.