And when as a child, half of the sounds sound the same, phonetic sounding of words make no sense - phonics is not the way to go. I definitely struggled in phonic classes and hating reading for so much of elementary school because of that emphasis on phonics... when I still just guessed as to which "sound" the teacher is using, and hoped that I was making the correct sounds while reading out loud (which half of the time, I was not). Once I ended up in a class where doing all that phonetic stuff was not required, I took off in reading and the teacher told my mother to just leave me alone regarding reading - I was enjoying it finally, and she said I would fill in the gaps myself much more readily if I enjoyed reading. If I was all over the map in what I was reading, who cared? (according to my mother, that is basically what my teacher told her)
Yes, there is probably some phonetic awareness now, although I know way more words in their written form than spoken and struggle still at times connecting the spoken words to their written form.
Hence I wonder about all the emphasis on requirement of understanding phonics for kindergarten/first grade. It seems like it is often used as a criteria to be accepted to a private kindergarten or to move into first grade.
As for Chinese and sound radicals, I am curious... I will ask my mother about her experiences in learning to read Chinese. I recall watching her look up characters in a Chinese dictionary and asking her how in the world does she narrow down to where to even look, and I remember her explaining they go by the number of strokes in a character.
