My oldest child was completely unable to read until I taught him with phonics. My youngest was taught with phonics starting at age 4. I see phonics as a quick way to learn many words - bot, cot, dot, got, lot, etc. Children quickly master many little words and then build on their success. Some words do have to be memorized by sight because they don’t follow standard pronunciation rules but you work on that bit by bit. Phonics and sight memorization go hand in hand to completely master reading but phonics is the best place to get started and become quickly successful.
“Phonics and sight memorization go hand in hand to completely master reading but phonics is the best place to get started and become quickly successful.”
But even what you’re calling sight isn’t really - it’s more like phonics, with some deviations - since phonics can be used to to almost sound out even the tougher words in English.
If we had to rely on Whole Language, we would see a character string such as “lknpe” and remember that it means water, whereas as “lkcnpe” means waiter. That’s what Whole Language is...the letters mean nothing, just a bunch of useless symbols - it’s the shape of the word, and only the shape of the word that means anything.