So all of China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea are all illiterate? Ideographic languages cannot be learned through phonics, and yet these countries are (mostly) outstripping the US academically. Phonics is a great tool *for some students*, but it isn’t a Silver Bullet. I learned on sightwords, and very early at that, and am highly educated as a result. The problem isn’t the lack of a particular tool; it’s the teachers themselves and the system they operate in.
RE: “so all of China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea are all illiterate? Ideographic languages cannot be learned through phonics,.....”
A month ago somebody on American Thinker wrote to me about this very issue and here is what I sent back to him:
“Hello, P.
You’re in luck. I’ve run into this question a lot and obsessed on it quite
a bit.
English has a million total words and scores of little words, for
example, in constructions such as “has been running.” You can get by
with “runs.”
English could never ever work as a sight language. If you want to have a
ideographic language like Chinese, you have to invent and use new words
very sparingly. You have to eliminate all unnecessary words. I suspect
that the sentence we translate as “A journey of 1000 miles begins with a
single step” is in Chinese something like: “Many steps start with one
step” or even “Steps start step.”
Similarly, Chinese might say something like “No ticket, no laundry,” a
total of three different symbols. The English says “if you do not have
your ticket, you cannot have your laundry.”
Interestingly, Chinese is much more like math or programming. If A, then B.
Another huge factor is that we have many different shapes for each
letter, preeminently uppercase and lowercase. Chinese symbols come in one
form and typically, there is a pictorial element. (Note that the shift
from they to THEY means that every part of the symbol has changed. In
sight-word memorization, this is going to be devastating.)
At the end of high school, our smarter students probably read a hundred
thousand words. At Chinese high schools, they are only expected to master
a few thousand symbols. (Phonics is the key to all those million words.
But in a sight-word language, if you have memorized 2000 symbols, you
still cannot recognize 2001st.
Also, I think they’re very opportunistic and creative in combining
familiar terms to create a new term. Paper and tiger are probably two of
the words they learn earliest; so why not put them together to designate
a weak opponent? (in English, the historical tendency is for the writer
to look to Greek or Latin or some exotic source and thereby to find a new
word.)
I read years ago that only the very smartest Chinese know even 20,000 of
their symbols. That’s your PhD professor, probably a scholar. This low
number tells you everything.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for the article....
Bruce Price
FYI: I have many related items on American Thinker, on my site
Improve-Education.org, and on YouTube.”
You can deny facts all you want, using a single counter-example.
I know a couple of people who just LOVE their Obamacare!
Obviously, if a language doesn’t use a phonetic alphabet, it would be difficult to teach phonics.
Since our language is written phonetically, it is, as the article says, child abuse not to teach reading phonetically.