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hirvi74says >"1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too."<

In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics.

I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us.

English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.

> In Chinese each word is a unique character.

This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).

But do these characters correspond to sounds?

Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?

I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?

Yes, because "葡" only has one pronunciation.

But there are other characters like "行" that have multiple pronunciations that vary depending on the word they appear in.

> But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument.

This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for sharing it in particular :)

These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.)

I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.

>English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.

"At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.

> In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.

We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well.

I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)

> Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?

Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century.

Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)

Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after.

Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…

The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries.

Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and).

Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters.

They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin.

It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.

> old-fashioned paper dictionaries

Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries?

(this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals

The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.

> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics,

From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets.

I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.

Character aren’t words though, and many words are at least two characters. Heck, most given names are two characters. 3k characters covers most of the words frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters that you don’t learn by sixth grade aren’t as useful (well, 囧 can be used as an emoji in a pinch).

That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read.

Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.

Most Chinese in urban schools are mostly literate by sixth grade, and can probably read simple articles by 7-8 years old. The average time to read is probably brought down by rural schools, people forget China still isn’t all rich cities with college-bound students in public schools past the last compulsory 9th grade.

It’s likely that the rural students are bringing the average down, but it seems less likely they could bring the average down so far given that only 1/3 of the country is rural.

Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.

Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.

Kids going to trade school after 9th grade are fairly common in many lower tier cities, and many of the poorer provinces. Technically urban, but bringing the average down.

But ok, Chinese is semi-logographic/semi-phonetic (many words are made just by characters with the right sound) at this point, which is a confusing hot mess and requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school (well, at least for city kids).

I’m talking about kids between 6 and 11 years old so dropping out in 9th grade seems not completely relevant. But if we’re talking about subsegments of the population bringing down the average, removing a few low performing states from the US would drastically change the average here too.

>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school

I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.

To be followed by a life of trying to remember the f**ing classical Chinese character that you read once 30 years ago, used twice and now can neither remember nor find in a dictionary.

I see this almost every time I meet with Chinese friends: they have forgotten one or more particular ideograms that have a particular meaning and simply cannot recover them w/o extensive discussion with their educated Chinese peers. They chalk it up to their faulty memory: I chalk it up to a faulty language.

sachertorte (well, "sarchertech") says "Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language."

Apparently not enough to be mentioned on this thread!8-))

Here's an interesting Reddit thread that discusses modern languages on a scale ranging from purely phonetic to purely logographic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/bv7r1p/wh...

While I must admit I would give a rat's ass (but not much more) to know any common logographic language today, I would never go to the trouble to learn one. The effort is simply too great, the payoff too limited, and there are other better ways to use the rest of my life.

US students are expected to be able to read 104 characters by the end of 6th grade. While Chinese students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time.

Characters in Chinese can be combined to make more words, and you need around 9k words in English to read a novel and 2k characters in Chinese to read a novel.

It is wrong to compare number of characters in English to number of words in Chinese. The proper comparison would be words in English to words in Chinese. By 4th grade I knew enough English to proofread ycombinator posts. Of course, that is a low bar...

And I think you're off by an order of magnitude about vocabulary size. Chinese vocabulary size around 6th grade is more like 2K - 4k words tops, not 20K. See

https://www.guavarama.com/2015/02/06/chinese-characters-by-g...

I get that there are tradeoffs and that logographic languages have advantages and disadvantages.

In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.

In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.

It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.

> So there is no phonics system for Chinese.

Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.

> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?

I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.

It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.

I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.

My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.

When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.

Anyone who learned to read before their third birthday is exceptional and not an example from which we can draw inferences.

But good on her! My son is similarly talented with language and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.

I am not sure the child is exceptional so much as the environment. It depends on what you mean by being able to read. What level of reading?

I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional.

She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.

When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.

IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class).

The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.

Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience.

While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading.

Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child.

[1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.

She does seem to have a talent for languages. Not many people pick up that many easily. I have even managed to forget a language I was fluent in (I was bilingual and I spoke Sinhala as well as I did English, and could read and write it to the level expected by schools at my age until I was six) as a child. It has a phonetic alphabet, BTW.

As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).

I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.

We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.

> The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc.

True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.

Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England.

FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics.

Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces.

As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.

I am not sure. It would not surprise me though. As an American, we are always striving to turn the most mundane activities into competitions for some reason...

For what it is worth, I also think British English is more consistent than American English in pronunciation.

For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and "Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.

American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..

Simple words like:

Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"

Interesting => "In-tra-sting"

etc..

> As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.

Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.

Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may" without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat", "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.

I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack, ball, etc. are far more consistent.

> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?

The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/

French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:

- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)

- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)

- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")

The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.

> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)

Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.

My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.

To further this, a perfect example are some of the culinary words vs. the animal words in English.

Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.

Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.

It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.

No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing to bet that more native English words have irregular spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have irregular spellig is because English has been a written language for a long time. That is why you have words like Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used to be prounouced.

Knee is the same in German as it is in English. However, the Germans pronounce the K, e.g., "Kah-nee."

The word for "Knight" in German is "Ritter" if I am not mistaken? Though, I have no idea where the word Knight comes from. (Which I intend to look up after posting this).

In spanish we never did this, because even though there's exceptions to spelling rules, there aren't all that many. motivated elementary school children would just not miss barring lack of concentration.

> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine.

Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.

> Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.

I have also seen this in learning materials:

1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well.

2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.