One of the key things any parent should be doing is making sure their children are exposed to books from a very young age. And please make sure you take the time to read with your child.
We’ve been reading since mine was very young. His comprehension is great, but trying to make him read or sound out the words? It’s not even that he can’t if you force him, the motivation is just not there. I really hope school will change something there.
All my kids went through this. We read a lot of books together and every kid when starting school was eagerly awaiting the time they finally read by themselves. And every one of them struggled with the phonetics part. They argued that it’s too hard and the lessons are not fun. But we knew that we learned like this and that it worked for us. So with more work it finally clicked. They are all very good readers now. They read tons of books and comics and can sound out words or names they don’t know.
I think the system of teaching the phonetics is the best way but how we can keep kids motivated during the boring lessons is something we should tackle. By the way my experiences come from a German background.
To be fair, English phonetics are a pain in the ass. Sounds change with no rhyme or reason to them, and the only way to learn all the different permutations is to see them all.
This is quite a harmful misconception that keeps getting thrown around! English phonetics make sense; the phenomenon people notice is that in English, orthography recapitulates etymology, because English more than other languages acquires words from multiple sources (the broad categories are Germanic, Latin, and Greek). e.g. "orthography recapitulates etymology" contains Greek, Latin, and Greek derived words in order.
Maybe. I’m not well informed enough to say one way or the other, but it seems doubtful to me. Regardless, the end result is that it doesn’t. Nobody speaks English without loanwords, and someone has already demonstrated that doing that leads to such wonders as ‘uncleftish beholding’.
German has strict grammatical rules but we also have tons of words coming from Latin and close relative French.
But I know what you mean. Being thought pronunciation in school in Oxford English taught by a teacher with heavy German accent wasn’t helpful. I learned most words and pronunciation from TV shows and movies but I can’t really spell a lot of words by heart. Reading is different because I know a lot of words. But the reverse doesn’t work for me. Luckily I write with assistance of my computer. To be fair I struggled with this also in German. Writing correctly was always a pain.
