Comment by faster | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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