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Comparing Japanese phonetic alphabets to English is not the correct comparison, as published works in Japanese for adult readers are invariably written in kanji. The correct comparison is not the English alphabet which is used at all levels of reading development from beginner to adult, against hiragana which is an instructional alphabet abandoned when kanji are mastered, but the English alphabet against kanji. How long does it take a normal child to learn to read in the English alphabet? Well, in traditional methods, they used to start in first grade (though most children already had some ability to read from home instruction) and they were off and running in second grade and "reading" was finished as a subject matter by fourth grade for sure; whereas as I note, Japanese university students are still working on kanji.
English is not a phonetic language. (see above.) !
Yes it is, it's just an imperfectly phonetic language. First of all, you've got 5 vowel letters (6 if you count y which you really should) and 21 consonants (or maybe 20 1/2 since y can swing either way). The consonants are pretty much constant except for a few that have both hard and soft sounds. Then for vowel letters you've got typically two common sounds for each. Of COURSE children reading a word for the first time are going to be prone to mistakes. But they're not going to read "pet the cat" and look at the picture of the child stroking a feline and assume the sentence is "Pete the Kate" which has no meaning! Nope, they're going to look at that and say "pet the cat" because that's a sentence that makes sense!
I don't know the statistics, but I'd guess something like 90% of common English words follow a very small number of rules for pronunciation based on the alphabet. Of the remaining 10% irregular written words, probably 9% are still decipherable based on more complex but still logical rules, and 1% simply have to be learned and memorized.
The idea that children are incapable of doing this and have instead to learn to read by rote memorization of every single collection of letter shapes making up the working vocabulary of a functioning person (say, 10,000 words) is crazy. It's even more crazy when you consider that these 5 and 6 year old children are totally capable of learning the correct usage of spoken English which is highly irregular as to verb tense, subject and object agreement, and is just loaded with thousands of idiomatic expressions. Yet by the time they're 6, most are speaking reasonably accurate idiomatic English, though of course learning to use the language correctly and expressively is a lifetime study.
Cough...sounds like off.
Through...sounds like oo.
Thought...sounds like aw
Thorough...sounds like o
Rough..rhymes with cuff
Bough...sounds like ow
What about silent h, like herb or hour or honest vs. sounded, like horse, help, or here? Where's the h in sugar or sure?
Words that don't rhyme: lone and one, tow and how, toe and shoe...
Same sound different spelling: tow and toe, here and hear, their and there...
And there are words like ice and pace where the c sounds like s, but there are words like tic and carry where it sounds like a k. In the word scent, is the s or the c silent? Why doesn't sc make the sk sound like in scoop?
Why isn't the spelling telefone, elefant, fotografy? Because they came from Greek...lexicon, not leksikon.
Rendez-vous and hors d'oeuvre and chauffeur came from French, so they're spelled the way the French use the alphabet.
And there's no accent to show which syllable is stressed. I bought a record. I record my time.
What do herb, job, and polish have in common? They're pronounced differently when they're capitalized.
Here is a brief summary of where many borrowed words in English come from: Latin–29%, French–29%, Greek–6%, other languages–6%, and proper names–4%. That leaves only 26% of English words that are actually English!
Then you have the different spellings of words in British english vs. US English- color vs. colour, jewelry vs. jewellery, aluminum vs. aluminium, etc.
You also have the different pronunciations- like with urinal, garage, vitamin, advertisement, etc.
Phonics is a good tool to have in the shed, but it should not be the only tool English learners should have.
Comparing Japanese phonetic alphabets to English is not the correct comparison, as published works in Japanese for adult readers are invariably written in kanji. The correct comparison is not the English alphabet which is used at all levels of reading development from beginner to adult, against hiragana which is an instructional alphabet abandoned when kanji are mastered, but the English alphabet against kanji.
Hiragana is a syllabary, not an alphabet, and it is never abandoned, Hiragana is essential to written Japanese and is used in combination with kanji at all times.
I minored in Japanese as an undergrad and found that recognizing kanji characters was no more difficult than recognizing English words. A fluent English-speaker reader doesn't sound out words, but recognizes them as a unit at a glance. It's the same in Japanese. Once you can read well, if you see a word you know from the spoken language once or twice, you know it from then on. And in Japan, I noted that even quite young Japanese children had a pretty strong ability to read and recognize kanji.
The reason Japanese children take so many years learning kanji in school is not really so they can recognize them, it's so they can write them. That is the hard part, as they have to be written correctly, every stroke in the right order, and that takes time. The situation is somewhat similar to English-speakers who have trouble with spelling. Spelling (production of written words) is much harder than reading.
Hiragana is a syllabary, not an alphabet, and it is never abandoned, Hiragana is essential to written Japanese and is used in combination with kanji at all times.
I minored in Japanese as an undergrad and found that recognizing kanji characters was no more difficult than recognizing English words. A fluent English-speaker reader doesn't sound out words, but recognizes them as a unit at a glance. It's the same in Japanese. Once you can read well, if you see a word you know from the spoken language once or twice, you know it from then on. And in Japan, I noted that even quite young Japanese children had a pretty strong ability to read and recognize kanji.
The reason Japanese children take so many years learning kanji in school is not really so they can recognize them, it's so they can write them. That is the hard part, as they have to be written correctly, every stroke in the right order, and that takes time. The situation is somewhat similar to English-speakers who have trouble with spelling. Spelling (production of written words) is much harder than reading.
Rabbit clearly doesn’t have a great grasp of Japanese language and learning. Apparently there are around 2000 kanji in regular use and 10,000 kanji overall. I don’t think that’s at all surprising. The OED has something like 600,000 words, but I think the average speaker knows or can recognize something like 40-50K of those words.
Add in that hiragana and katakana also serve specific purposes. There are some words always written in hiragana, while katakana is used for foreign words. My inkan (signature stamp) was written in katakana. My Japanese is terrible, but when in doubt (when I lived there) I would speak in Katakana English and sometimes would get some understanding that I did not get using native speaker English. If English was like Japanese, the majority of our words would be in katakana and not in Kanji/hiragana.
OK, I'll stand corrected on any errors I made about Japanese education (and the distinction between alphabetic writing and syllabic writing, I would respectfully submit, is not germane to the discussion at hand; they're both means of having a symbol represent a sound, unlike ideographic writing); but I'm going to continue to maintain that the first step in English reading instruction should be learning the sounds of each letter and how those convert to spoken language.
Of COURSE after a certain number of exposures, English readers stop sounding out a word and more to recognizing it at sight, but to insist that at-sight memorization of written words should be the fundamental principle in learning to read an alphabetic language is like saying children should learn to throw and catch a ball by starting out with 9 person baseball teams complete with pitcher's mounds, uniforms, umpires, and electronic scoreboards; that the step of tossing a ball back and forth in the yard to build the basic skills can be dispensed with.
Some people get hung up on their favorite way to learn to read (phonics being one method). There are several ways of teaching reading (easy to google "different approaches to learning to read"). No one method is THE way to teach reading. Teachers are different, so are learners.
Originally Posted by in_newengland View Post
English is not a phonetic language. (see above.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit33
Yes it is, it's just an imperfectly phonetic language. First of all, you've got 5 vowel letters (6 if you count y which you really should) and 21 consonants (or maybe 20 1/2 since y can swing either way). The consonants are pretty much constant except for a few that have both hard and soft sounds. Then for vowel letters you've got typically two common sounds for each. Of COURSE children reading a word for the first time are going to be prone to mistakes. But they're not going to read "pet the cat" and look at the picture of the child stroking a feline and assume the sentence is "Pete the Kate" which has no meaning! Nope, they're going to look at that and say "pet the cat" because that's a sentence that makes sense!
I don't know the statistics, but I'd guess something like 90% of common English words follow a very small number of rules for pronunciation based on the alphabet. Of the remaining 10% irregular written words, probably 9% are still decipherable based on more complex but still logical rules, and 1% simply have to be learned and memorized.
The idea that children are incapable of doing this and have instead to learn to read by rote memorization of every single collection of letter shapes making up the working vocabulary of a functioning person (say, 10,000 words) is crazy. It's even more crazy when you consider that these 5 and 6 year old children are totally capable of learning the correct usage of spoken English which is highly irregular as to verb tense, subject and object agreement, and is just loaded with thousands of idiomatic expressions. Yet by the time they're 6, most are speaking reasonably accurate idiomatic English, though of course learning to use the language correctly and expressively is a lifetime study.
That's right. What I'm saying is that phonics works for some kids, look say works for some kids, a combination of methods using what works best for each individual kid is what truly works.
I taught first grade and used a combination of methods but I did not use ALL phonics or ALL look say. There was a teacher who had started teaching back around 1920!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She told me that even back then the "experts" used to make them stop teaching phonics --so they would hide their phonics materials but still use them along with the other methods.
By the next year the fad would be phonics so they would hide their other materials but they still taught reading using a combination. FADS come and go. No two kids learn the same. Don't get impressed with some new fad because, as that elderly wonderful teacher told me, "THERE'S NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN!"
Cough...sounds like off.
Through...sounds like oo.
Thought...sounds like aw
Thorough...sounds like o
Rough..rhymes with cuff
Bough...sounds like ow
What about silent h, like herb or hour or honest vs. sounded, like horse, help, or here? Where's the h in sugar or sure?
Words that don't rhyme: lone and one, tow and how, toe and shoe...
Same sound different spelling: tow and toe, here and hear, their and there...
And there are words like ice and pace where the c sounds like s, but there are words like tic and carry where it sounds like a k. In the word scent, is the s or the c silent? Why doesn't sc make the sk sound like in scoop?
Why isn't the spelling telefone, elefant, fotografy? Because they came from Greek...lexicon, not leksikon.
Rendez-vous and hors d'oeuvre and chauffeur came from French, so they're spelled the way the French use the alphabet.
And there's no accent to show which syllable is stressed. I bought a record. I record my time.
What do herb, job, and polish have in common? They're pronounced differently when they're capitalized.
Here is a brief summary of where many borrowed words in English come from: Latin–29%, French–29%, Greek–6%, other languages–6%, and proper names–4%. That leaves only 26% of English words that are actually English!
You start with phonics, as a first step, a fundamental. Then, in 2nd or 3rd grade, you branch out to learn the "exceptions" to the basic phonics principle, of which there are many, obviously. But you build gradually. Kids can absorb all the wonkiness in English step by step over time. At least with phonics as a starting place, they know there's some measure of method to the madness.
For beginners, it's important to have a grounding that introduces some predictability. It provides confidence. Then later as they build vocabulary that doesn't fit the mold, it's not as overwhelming as it would be, otherwise.
Last edited by Ruth4Truth; 03-03-2023 at 12:49 PM..
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