Molly Young’s NY Times article on disgust (from Dec. 27, 2021; archived), which focuses on Paul Rozin, a psychologist known for his work on the topic, includes the following passage on an entirely different, language-related, subject:
As he quickly worked his way up from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, Rozin decided that he was tired of animal studies and wanted to focus on bigger game.
Around 1970, he turned his attention to the acquisition of reading. In Philadelphia — as in many American cities — there was a problem with kids’ learning to read. Eager to discover why, Rozin parked himself in elementary-school classes and observed something strange: A large number of children were unable to read by second grade, but those same children were always fluent in spoken English. They could name thousands of objects, and they could point to Rozin and ask, “Why is this strange man lurking in my classroom?” Compared with the vast dictionary of words filed neatly in their brains, mastering an alphabet of 26 letters would seem to be a piece of cake. Instead, it was a crisis. With a collaborator, Rozin devised an experimental curriculum that moved children through degrees of linguistic abstraction by teaching them Chinese logographs followed by a Japanese syllabary, and only then applying the same logic to English. Rozin says the system worked like a dream, but the school’s response was tepid.
“The bureaucracy, the politics — I was overwhelmed,” he said. Nothing about the process of pitching and marketing and lobbying appealed to him. He calculated that it would take years to sell administrators on the curriculum and train teachers to deliver it. Instead, he and a colleague wrote several papers with the findings and walked away. “It’s the right way to teach reading,” he said nearly 50 years later, with a shrug. “As far as I know, nothing happened with it.” At the time, he wondered if maybe some other researchers would run with the idea. But Rozin was done. His mind was elsewhere, percolating on the subject he would become best known for.
Sounds weird to me, but hey, maybe it works. Thanks, Bathrobe!
This sounds like a fad that flared up in the 50s in the States. It had to do with “reading words as a whole.” [Was the term “gestalt” thrown around too ?]. I can’t remember what it was called. Either it, or the rival traditional method, was later claimed by a bunch of people to be the reason Why Johnny Can’t Read (you may have heard of that book).
Here’s how the WiPe describes the “whole language” method that flared up, they say, in the 80s and 90s. Some things never change, they just recur:
# Whole language is an educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain in the 1980s and 1990s,[1] despite there being no scientific support for the method’s effectiveness.[8] It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.[9][10][11]
Whole-language approaches to reading instruction are typically contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing. Phonics-based methods emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. Whole-language practitioners disagree with that view and instead focus on teaching meaning and making students read more.[12] The scientific consensus is that whole-language-based methods of reading instruction (e.g., teaching children to use context cues to guess the meaning of a printed word)[10][7][5] are not as effective as phonics-based approaches.[17] #
The “technique” of “speed-reading” was based on that – just let the words flow into your eyes straight on to your brain, don’t try to analyze them into letters and syllables. I remember trying to learn how to do that. It didn’t work. I still haven’t read La Princesse de Clèves – no time.
That some countries/regions/schools achieve near 100% child literacy using traditional methods, suggests to me that Bad Old Alphabet is not the main problem.
Have you verified that those children did not read manga comics and the tao te ching before going to school ?
Rudolf Flesch, the author of Why Johnny Can’t Read
# Not long after finishing his graduate degree, in 1955 he published what became his most famous book, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It.[1] The book was a critique of the then-trendy practice of teaching reading by sight, often called the “look-say” method. #
So “look-say” was a 40s term for the same thing as “whole language” in the 80s.
I guess speed-reading was based on “look-say”, or rather “look don’t say”.
Like apparently any method for learning anything, it probably works on some people but not on others. 😐 But if “a large number of children were unable to read by second grade”, that sounds like something was wrong with those particular schools!
Amazingly, the whole-word method was exported to German in the 90s. For the next 20 years my brother had trouble with words he hadn’t seen before, and he shuffles n around pretty often – and that’s even though reading clicked for him when he figured out the alphabetic principle right at the start of school.
But if “a large number of children were unable to read by second grade”, that sounds like something was wrong with those particular schools!
I agree.
How did the Initial Teaching Alphabet work out? I once knew someone from England who was taught to write through ITA first, then exposed to normal English spelling.
She was very intelligent and successful in all other respects, but a bad speller.
I remember hearing about this work back in college, and article does not seem to give an accurate description. If you want to read about the actual curriculum that Rozin and Gleitman developed for teaching reading, you can peruse their explanation here. In particular, the assertion
is, according to my understanding, simply wrong. Rozin did do an experiment in which
However, this was part of a program of pure research into how the brain processes written and spoken material. The experiment provided a jumping off point for his work on developing an improved way of teaching English reading, but the curriculum that was produced did not involve teaching any East Asian glyphs.
I learned written and spoken Bulgarian more or less simultaneously. Same with English. Only in high school I began to see see the difference.
Although my English lessons were both in orthography and IPA from the beginning. I was already familiar with the Latin alphabet from French before I even went to school, and it might have hindered my formal lessons in French in high school, because they didn’t use IPA.
As David Marjanović writes, this may well work great for some teachers teaching some children. This is far removed from its being the “right” way to teach the subject. The history of education is packed with examples where some teacher comes up with some technique that works well for them, publicizes it, and has it pronounced the “right” way, which every teacher now much copy. A few years later it is quietly dropped. Then a few decades later a functionally equivalent version will surface, and the cycle repeated.
The moral is that “this worked for me teaching my students” does not necessarily, or even likely, scale up. Perhaps it should be part of the tool kit for teachers dealing with second graders who can’t read, but this is not even distantly the same as its being the “right” way to teach the subject.
I don’t think you understand — no one taught me written Bulgarian: I just picked it up at the same pace I picked up spoken Bulgarian, from newspapers and such. I was fluent in both by age four. With English, I was taught from age seven with IPA and orthography. I had been reading French comics (Asterix and Obelix, Pif et Hercule) since age five (and was familiar with the correspondences between the alphabets), but I did not have a spoken reference until high school and my French teacher’s pronunciation.
I don’t think you understand — no one taught me written Bulgarian
Richard Hershberger was not responding to you but to the original post.
That line made me remember that I call English hierogliphs “logograms”. But it’s a joke, of course. It would be interesting to compare different languages and writing systems. If mixed input (in the form of orthographical irregularities of English) inhibits or discourages reading words as transcriptions, or if the way regular English sequences are mapped on sounds of all or some accents is not intuitive… It is not implausible at least.
I do not know the situation in Russia: “reading disabilities” is something Russians hardly ever discuss, and I only learned a word “dyslexia” in connection to Bush jr. alongside with “natural gas is hemispheric”. Here they teach children to read words out loud syllable by syllable. During my first 4 months in grade 1 they were doing it a lot (alongside with dictations and writing exercises). Then this assignment was less common and by grade 2 they were doing something else. But I did not care if my classmates learned anything or not.
Leaning 30 chinese characters in a few hours was not difficult for adult myself. Must be easy for children:)
Received wisdom among my teacher friends is that any new reading system produces better results – for a little while. So quite possibly the whole word thing started off well, and in particular for people who were struggling with phonics, and now were dealing with something they hadn’t already failed at.
(I taught myself to read before I went to school, and as far as I remember anything about the process – which I really don’t – it felt more like recognising words than like sounding them out in pieces, so I can kind of see the attraction of that as an idea.)
((Oddly, wikipedia appears to think that teaching yourself to read is not just a thing that sometimes happens, but a kind of illness. I’m not aware of having had problems with spoken language – I’ve got the good ‘ear’ for accents which occasionally makes me sound far more fluent than I actually am, for example…))
Legasthenie in German, BTW.
any new reading system produces better results – for a little while
One of the difficulties with interpreting even double-blind clinical trials in medicine is that merely being included in a clinical trial improves your prognosis (whether you’re on the placebo arm of the trial or the treatment arm.)
Consequently, new treatments never work quite as well in Real Life as the trials would suggest (even before you start factoring in the fact that the patients are nearly always a more diverse group than in the trials.)
Received wisdom among my teacher friends is that any new reading system produces better results – for a little while.
That makes sense. And it chimes with this quote from Nathan Heller’s superb NYkr piece “What Happens When an Élite Public School Becomes Open to All?” (archived): “Pedagogy is full of big ideas, but its unofficial golden rule is that, whenever something really works, you keep doing it.”
A букварь from 1962 on libgen:
Ма-ша | ма-ма | у-ра
Шу-ра | Ма-ра | Ма-ша
У-ра, Ма-ша!
У-ра! У-ра! У-ра!
|ра|-|..| 🪟 (*frame* picture)
|Му| – |..| 😸 (*cat face*)
|Шу|-|..| 👧 (*girl face*)
ра-ма рама рама
На!
на| ра-ма | ра-на
на-ша | ра-на | ра-ма
На, Ма-ша, ⚽ . (*beach ball*)
———
Oh yes, I attended school much later, but there were those numerous у-ра!
I remember reading and discussing a newspaper article about dyslexic children being better at reading Chinese signs than words in the Latin alphabet ca. 1984 in biology class at school (the topic was learning in animals and humans). I guess that article must have been about Rozin’s experiments.
I remember it already being around in the 1960s.
After all, Ganzheitspsychologie was a German invention — after all the Jewish geniuses of Gestaltpsychologie had emigrated for all too obvious reasons, their Nazi successors decided their Ganzheitspsychologie was an improved, and (very important) non-Jewish version. It was still taught at some German universities (Köln, for example) in the 1970s (without the specific Nazi elements, of course).
Мама мыла раму
Папа курит Приму
2012 Seminar in Köln über Carl Stumpf als geistiger Vater der Gestalt- und Ganzheitspsychologie
Anglophones with knowledge of basic German might titter about his name. I don’t know why that doesn’t happen often in Germany (unless one has a schoolboy mentality). Perhaps it’s because there are so many people here whose surnames are simple everyday words that if you started tittering you’d never stop. Maybe it also depends on who you run with. I was never into schoolboys.
My optician is named Dumm.
Vedic Roots of Slavs.
Hare Rāma Hare Rāma Rāma Rāma Hare Hare Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare
You’re giving me ’70s flashbacks!
My optician is named Dumm
Brutus.
The Romans were the ones for proudly-borne insulting family names (Varus, Strabo, Crassus, Naso, Calvus, Cicero …)
I’ve never altogether got over the discovery that the two principal families of the none-more-eminent-than-us Claudii were the Studlys and the Prettyboys.
That’s impressive.
But Prof. Wolfgang Deppert still has him beat.
At school, I had a brave teacher called Mr Smellie.
any new reading system produces better results – for a little while
to me, this sounds like “when it’s done by people who’ve thought deeply about it as pedagogy (and probably about pedagogy more generally) while devising it or being taught by the people who did”. which isn’t at all surprising, and neither is the fall-off after that phase, especially in the u.s., where teaching is so thoroughly devalued as a craft as well as labor (and where teaching methods are often taught as “follow this rulebook because it is The Right Way”).
There is a lot of really intelligent commentary about how reading is learned in the Rozin and Gleitman article I linked (as well as the others about the original experiments). However, there is one drawback that I don’t think they discussed much. The experiments they did were frequently with children for which the usual methods of teaching reading were almost completely failing. They showed that a very different method could typically work for these students, which is extremely interesting, as it shows that the students can be taught to read; they just aren’t responding to the existing curriculum. That means that students who are not succeeding under one form of instruction can still be taught to read using a different form. However, it says nothing about the overall failure rates of the old and new methods compare. Rozin’s strategy might work well for 92% percent of students and fail for 8%. That sounds good, but if the previous method worked for 94% and failed for 6%, changing to Rozin’s curriculum is probably not a good idea. It might be an excellent idea to keep Rozin’s and Gleitman’s curriculum (or something else) around as an alternative option for those kids who do fall into the 6%.
I recall learning that people with dyslexia see letters 3 dimensionally. That is, they perceive the shape as if if were 3 dimensional and could be twisted around. So a d and a b and a p in a lot of fonts they see as the same. I can imagine Chinese characters, being more complex, are less likely to be flipped and look like something else. Of course, there’s a lot more of them, which seems to me counteracts any effect of being easier to learn for some people… a hugely bigger number to learn.
a brave teacher called Mr Smellie
I remember that Mother once came home giggling irrepressibly. She had made house calls—she was a pediatrician—and the family name at one house was Хуянов/Khuyanov ‘Mr. Willie/Dicky’.
l@Jen in Edinburgh: My older kid was a proficient reader before entering school. They got it from a combination of the usual parents-reading-to-child and PBS Kids programming on television, particularly Word World, which teaches phonics in a surprisingly engaging (and Neo-Platonic) manner. My understanding from talking with the teachers is that this is pretty normal, in that a couple of kids in each kindergarten will be this way. This was in a middle class public school.
The speed-reading methods I’ve read about all assume that the reader knows how to read before learning speed-reading. In my experience, speed-reading can be important during timed school tests, but not so important in everyday life.
Brett, thanks for the article, it’s very interesting. The nonsense about Chinese “words” is a bit worrying, though.
I quite like the idea of schools teaching the history of writing along with teaching the actual reading and writing, but I can see how school administrators would be uninterested.
@juha
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoy
Khoyan would then have the Armenian name suffix.
And of course, there’s an obligatory Vovochka joke
Приходит Вовочка в первый класс.Учительница всех рассаживает и говорит:
Ну давайте, дети, знакомится, каждый встает и говорит свою фамилию.
Ну дети встают , бодро произносят свои фамилии и садяться довольные
на место. Тут доходит очередь до Вовочки, он встает и молчит.
Учительница спрашивает: А ты , мальчик чего молчишь? Как твоя фамилия?
Вовочка молчит. Учительница снова говорит: Да ты не стисняйся, тут все
свои , это твои однокласники, они смеяться не будут. Вовочка молчит.
Учительница пытается как-то выйти из положения: Ну с чем ассоциируется
твоя фамилия, что напоминает?
Вовочка смущенно говорит: Ну…. она ассоциируется с тем, что вы каждое
утро в рот берете….
Учительница удивленно: Хуйкин, что-ли?
-Да нет, Ложкин.
Briefly, chilldren—Vovochka among them—are starting school. The (female) teacher asks them to introduce themselves. When it comes Vovochka’s turn, he keeps silent. The teacher tries to encourage him, but to no avail. Finally, she suggests he say something resembling his name.
Embarrassed, Vovochka says: ‘My surname resembles something you put into your mouth every morning…’
The teacher, surprised, suggests: ‘Do you mean to say it’s Khuykin?’
-‘No, it’s Lozhkin’. (lozhka ‘spoon’)
Jen in Edinburgh: “Oddly, wikipedia appears to think that teaching yourself to read is not just a thing that sometimes happens, but a kind of illness. I’m not aware of having had problems with spoken language – I’ve got the good ‘ear’ for accents which occasionally makes me sound far more fluent than I actually am, for example…))”
I have a diplomat friend of mine who has a very pronounced Andalusian accent in any language he attempts to speak: Persian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or English. EDIT: And I’m the exact opposite, like you. It’s cute, in a way.
Teaching yourself to read in absence of printed/written material around would be a miracle rather than illness… Otherwise there is a range of situations, in terms of amount of this material, of how interesting it is, what parents do to it and to the child (reading to children, obviously..)…
Do they mean that children with hearing impairment are more motivated?
Defining “teaching yourself” based on “in school/not in school” makes no sense at all. School is just a place where a teacher tries to work with 30 (in my case) kids at once. By no means it is an efficient environement for learning – and the fact that it has not really changed since when vast majority of kids here grew in illiterate families demonstrates that there is a problem. The same thing can’t be optimal for both an illiterate family and children of, say, a programmer (who totally can share much of school curriculum with her child herself).
But otherwise, as I said, it is a range of situations, I do not know where “teaching yourself” starts.
They say Sofia Kovalevskaya (“the first Russian female mathematician”, whose portraits hang in some school in classes) grew up in a room were lecture notes (calculus) were used as a wallpaper. Whether true or not, but it is indeed likely that a child growing in such a room will play with math.
There were hundreds books in my room where I grew up as a baby, thousands more in my house. Of course my chances to learn to read early are higher than they would be in a “cartoon working class” house or in a house of a “cartoon professor” (books locked in the “library”, works in a “study”, only teases kids with a newspaper in morning. I read newspapers back then – but they were extemely depressive. Maybe it was just such a boring period in life of my country).
It’s not just the complexity; the way they work, almost all of them can’t be flipped in any direction without not looking like a possible Chinese character anymore.
But most consist of several parts that can be rearranged.
Moa: what is the supposed difference between reading and “speed-reading”?
Jen in Edinburgh: “Oddly, wikipedia appears to think that teaching yourself to read is not just a thing that sometimes happens, but a kind of illness.” Probably some religious fundamentalists.
Jewish geniuses of Gestaltpsychologie
Flesch himself was a Jewish Gestalt psychologist, and very bitter too about what he saw as the distortion of Gestalt by the whole-wordists. The comprehension of how a new word falls under the system of rules that are already known, he says, is a perfect example of Gestalt: if we know that “race” represents race and “face” represents face, then it is by Gestalt comprehension that we can see that “grace” must be grace.
I do not mean, I should add, that Flesch was a professional psychologist: his degrees were in law and library science. But he thought in terms of Gestalt psychology, as WJCR makes clear.
I don’t think you understand — no one taught me written Bulgarian: I just picked it up at the same pace I picked up spoken Bulgarian, from newspapers and such. I was fluent in both by age four. With English, I was taught from age seven with IPA and orthography. I had been reading French comics (Asterix and Obelix, Pif et Hercule) since age five (and was familiar with the correspondences between the alphabets), but I did not have a spoken reference until high school and my French teacher’s pronunciation.
I don’t actually remember when I learned to read in Russian; as far as I can remember I always did. I could definitely read fluently by age four, and probably significantly earlier than that. Not sure how it corresponded to spoken language.
(The family lore version is that the written language came first, and that this is why I read silently – because at the time I started reading I didn’t yet quite know how to speak.)
With English, as far as I can recall, I was already good at it (or so I thought) by the time I started officially learning it in kindergarten; but I could have picked some of it up during my (many) childhood visits to Israel. Again, I do not recall ever not being able to read in English, though I do recall being occasionally surprised of that ability.
I don’t think I ever learned much French. I did learn some Hebrew, but not a lot, and it’s not an easy language to read in anyway.
Pif et Hercule was the first book I specifically remember reading, but my edition was in Russian (Приключения Пифа). Asterix and Obelix I first found out about as cartoons, well into the 2000s, and didn’t find out that there were also comics until later.
Here they teach children to read words out loud syllable by syllable.
That’s the classic method, anyway (known in Russian as по складам, final stress). I don’t recall what my school used; probably nothing that I was around for, because in my first school I was tested into the 2nd grade class from the start. I think these days children are expected to be taught to read in kindergarten.
Oddly, wikipedia appears to think that teaching yourself to read is not just a thing that sometimes happens, but a kind of illness.
Wait, seriously? Which article?
That said, I suppose it might be viewed more negatively in English, where people who learn to read without a deliberate course can be particularly prone to spelling-influenced incorrect pronunciations (and spelling is sufficiently disorganized that this could be a serious problem).
The speed-reading methods I’ve read about all assume that the reader knows how to read before learning speed-reading. In my experience, speed-reading can be important during timed school tests, but not so important in everyday life.
It probably depends on what the normal reading speed is; if you read at 30 words per minute, it can be a serious drawback even in everyday life. Apparently the actual practical difference is by about a factor of two?
But yes, all the “speed reading” options I’ve heard of assume regular reading as the baseline.
They say Sofia Kovalevskaya (“the first Russian female mathematician”, whose portraits hang in some school in classes) grew up in a room were lecture notes (calculus) were used as a wallpaper. Whether true or not, but it is indeed likely that a child growing in such a room will play with math.
In my computer room, the floor used to be full of abandoned printouts from my history courses at university. My brother ended up stumbling on those sometime around age 4 (he could already read by then), which (possibly) kickstarted his interest in history.
There were hundreds books in my room where I grew up as a baby, thousands more in my house.
In the room where I grew up, there were thousands of books, and hundreds more in rest of the apartment (not a lot of places to put books in the other rooms). I was definitely not suffering from a deficit of reading material.
(Reportedly – this is, again, family lore level – at some point around age 8 I did run out, and my brain compensated by tuning down my comprehension, so that I could re-read better.
I don’t think this story is particularly plausible, but my comprehension was indeed fairly bad in my teenage years, and I don’t think it’s especially good now either.)
I read newspapers back then – but they were extemely depressive. Maybe it was just such a boring period in life of my country
As my mother likes to say, не читайте советских газет перед обедом. И вообще не читайте (“do not read Soviet newspapers before lunch, and better yet, don’t read them at all”).
I think this is a quote from somewhere, but if so, I don’t recall from where.
I remember being taught to read by my mother; I was probably about four, I think. Plastic letters were involved. They had different colours, and you could clip them together …
“Taught to read” is perhaps rather too elaborate a way of putting it; even with English, I suspect most of us here (at any rate) actually largely taught ourselves to read (by practicing a lot) after having had the initial steps pointed out to us.
Some people here have posted “narratives” about precocious things they did at age 3 or 4, and their precocious awareness of their precociousness even back then. There’s no verifying these stories, so I just take them at face value.
I can’t remember learning to read at that age, or sensing the truth of Wedderburn’s little theorem*. All I remember is that at some point those Dick and Jane books had to be read. I thought they were stupid and boring. That doesn’t count as precocious, it’s only natural.
*Two characters in Anéantir, Houellebecq’s latest, have a brief exchange in which it is mentioned. Pretentious, eux ? In one of his two recent novels he wheeled in a bit of mathematical terminology in the same way. I have a suspicion that it’s fashionable to have a bit of that, along with a bit of sex, in French novels. I don’t read enough of them to have good evidence. Or is it just these modern times ?
A lot of the kids in my kindergarten class could alr already read some when we started. (It was East Lansing, a college town with a big education school.) I certainly could, but I hadn’t taught myself on my own; I had had lots of lessons in preschool and at home.
My freind’s daughter (a hurricane child, she does not seem to be into anything quiet) began reading books when she got stuck in her grandmother’s village in winter. My freind explained that with that the grandmother is a teacher*, but … a Russian village in winter is a good place for reading.
It does not mean that she was not able to decipher a shop sign when she was 3.
—
*and thus demanding, not “and thus knows how to teach it”.
I value completeness as an end in itself. So I knew all the letters and apparently all the traffic signs when I was 4 (and I remember abandoning, though probably later than that, the attempt to learn all car brands when I noticed that was impossible; I’ve had no interest in cars since then). Shortly before I turned 5, I figured out how to read; I remember sitting on the floor and staring at an envelope with a company’s name on it (not a word I knew). In kindergarten (age 5) I read all the books that were there.
That got me a reputation as a genius. It remains normal in Austria to arrive in school at age 6 illiterate, except for your name in all-caps or such.
“All the letters” I said. Of course not. When I was 6, my dad presented both Serbian alphabets to me, so I promptly learned those too, though I remained unclear on how to pronounce some of the letter pairs until much later, and reading Cyrillic fluently only came with practice when I started to learn Russian at 14 years old.
On the genius side is my little cousin, who knew and spontaneously recognized a few letters at age two. We were quite stunned.
@DM, what do you mean by “figured out how”? Do you remember a moment when you were “solving” it (analytically) as a problem?
An aha moment such that before it you could not read a word, and after it you could do it?
I remember how I discovered that I can read books. That is, before it I beleived that I can’t, then I tried and I found that I can. But the discovery was not about the process at all.
No, I just ended up understanding how words are composed of letters.
But do you remember yourself seeing a word and not being able to interpret it as a word? (the “before”)
I absolutely do not remember this stage:(
As a word? Even though it’s got spaces around it?
Or as a particular word?
Memory is a wonderful thing.
I started reading when I was 3. Shortly afterwards I got into comics, especially ‘Mikijev zabavnik’ and ‘Mikijev almanah’ – Disney comics produced in Yugoslavia. I usually got them as a present for my birthday or as a treat when we went on a holiday.
Recently I came across some scanned versions on the internet and started reading a few issues that had familiar covers. I hadn’t seen these for about 40 years. It was amazing. Memories came flooding back: I remembered reading the comics for the first time, where I was, where we went on holiday, who was with us, etc.
As a phonetical word. The thread began from this: from children who who can’t read a sequence of familiar letters. I guess the implied problem is that they do not construct a “word” that can then be identified with a meaning or context (if the meaning is not known).
“All the letters” I said. Of course not.
I remember how I managed to teach myself about two thirds, I think, of the Armenian alphabet (the remaining letters were too uncommon to be sure of) in a single afternoon in Yerevan, by comparing street and shop signs to either their transliterations or appropriate international (and/or Russian) words.
I still have no idea how that worked. I was 22 years old at the time, so no precociousness here, but even then that story added yet another piece to my apparent reputation as a genius.
(Since then I’ve forgotten most of those letters, on the account of hardly ever having any reason to use them.)
When e-mails arrived in the form of кракозябры (that is, a substitution cipher because of the wrong code page) I was too lazy to write programs and simply deciphered them. And by the time I knew values of most letters I also was able to read it without consulting my table. Similarly I occasionaly learn and forget Devanagari or Tifinagh etc. – everyone here did that and knows what I mean. It literally takes minutes (unless you are trying to memorize the table – that takes weeks).
“that takes weeks”
as in Формула любви: “ежели постараться, то можно и за пять…”, “за десять дён одному не справиться. Тут помощник нужен”.
It literally takes minutes
Indeed it does; I’ve had the experience myself.
I think I usually had to reconstruct the correspondences all over again each time it came up, but (as you correctly mention) it’s quick enough – if the text is longer than a few words, anyway (and/or can be mostly reconstructed from context) – that this doesn’t really matter.
precociousness
I only learned that some people think that reading books in 3 is somehow early on international forums like this one. As a child I knew that I learned it in three and that it is “early”, but I assumed that other maybe learn in 4 (not in “kindergarten”) and some learn in 3.
When the teacher made 1st grade pupils read по слогам/по складам (by syllables) I just thought maybe they are less proficient. I did not know how to write in Russian cursive before school but I was able to read for a half of my (then) life, and we all were taught to write – did it make sense to assume that they do not read?
Actually i got my first bad grade for reading too fast. During the previous two months I spent lessons looking into the window, suffering from boredom (I could not read books in school), and trying not to listen to what was happening in the classroom (reading).
And then the teacher asked me to read the book everyone was reading. So I did and got 2, because I was supposed to read “by syllables”, not fast. I did not know that, I was disappointed (it was my first bad grade) and for good or for bad the effect was that I never cared about grades since then:)
Teachers like that should be whipped. I did essentially the same thing and got promoted in mid-year.
I too learned reading early, but I don’t remember that being seen as a problem. I think the teachers let me (and others like me) read aloud as the last one in each reading lesson, sort of as a proof of possibility. I don’t remember being particularly bored either. I had a lot of time to think about the system of writing and the relation to sounds.
The same goes for all subjects I’d read before we got introduced to them in school. I could think about them and how they were taught. I learned to trust my own varied reading over the schoolbooks and to raise my voice and argue when I disagreed with the teacher — and I always had teachers who appreciated, even supported, that.
Instead of doing homework I learned to improvise a solution when it was needed. (This served me pretty well until halfway through university, at which point I had no fallback strategy.) And when that didn’t work I learned to get out of the squeeze with a joke — and I always etc.
These are all valuable life skills, or professional skills, which I’m not sure I’d have developed if someone had decided I had to move up a year or two and be an even smaller and more intolerable smartass in a class where the idiots were even bigger.
And I really don’t think I was especially gifted. We develop our interests and skills in different ways at different speeds, and some of said idiots are now top professionals in widely different fields. In my own house, my son learned in much the same way as me, taught himself runes at age five, slid through school without resistance (although, unlike me, having teachers who believed passionately in the importance of repetitive homework), and eventually found himself struggling to acknowledge that university takes actual work. My daughter never had time for that reading business in early years, and she remembers the exact moment in first grade when she cracked the reading code (as the term seems to be). From that moment she read better and faster than anyone, a skill she might have used if she just had the time. Now in university, she still don’t read much on subjects outside of the curriculum, but she attacks every subject she does study as something that should be digested and reorganized into unforeseen communicative clarity.
I don’t remember being particularly bored either.
No more than anyone here, if she has to spend several hours on a bus stop, wating for a bus and doing nothing (not reading not anything).
One Spanish-language data point: I taught myself to read by age 4, simply by dint of having memorised the (relatively few) children’s books we had at home.
That led to play-acting at reading them when my parents weren’t around to read to me, and in turn to recognising how the letters on the page mapped to the sounds in my recollection.
(Admittedly, Spanish makes that a lot easier than French or English, though hardly as easy as Finnish.)
drasvi: No more than anyone here, if she has to spend several hours on a bus stop, wating for a bus and doing nothing (not reading not anything).
That may be it. I actually spent a fair part of my life as a young boy waiting for buses and doing nothing*. I usually had fun inside my own head. A friend once said that his mum had remarked that whenever they passed me on a bus stop**, I was smiling.
* If I tried reading I wouldn’t notice the bus until it was to late to make a sign.
** Passed me in the opposite direction, I always assumed. Benefit of the doubt.
Perhaps. In such a situation my wife would watch other people at (or walking past) the bus stop. I’d make sure I had something to read.