phonics

I'm not aware of the phonics things, though? Care to elaborate on it?

I swear they used to be forbidden to spend money on things like phonics. Parental income is highly correlated with child IQ.

At the moment "synthetic phonics" is recommended. An app that correctly teaches parents the sounds used would be great!

After getting enough listening input to have some handle on phonics, I'm all for reading as much as possible. Actually I think not doing that is why my Mandarin progressed fairly slowly until I got into...

Basic phonics training is particularly low-hanging fruit. Another great use is for memorizing words that one will very rarely hear in daily life and yet are the kinds of words everyone would be expected to know.

See, for example, the length of time that it's taken to get synthetic phonics over analytic phonics recognised as better for teaching children to read.

Likewise teaching English reading via "phonics" ignores the interconnection of the words and makes spelling harder rather than easier.

One book traces it back to the Unitarians capturing Harvard from the Congregationalists in the 1810-20 period, I use the 1930 when phonics were successfully attacked. That we're still arguing that, 50 years after the publication of Why Johnny Can't Read, tells us just about all we need to know about the US educational establishment.

I can even pronounce it reasonably well according to some Spanish-speaking coworkers because the phonics of other languages have always automagically "clicked" for me, except when I have to learn new vowels or consonants.