notnafnaf, you probably would have done better with some true phonemic awareness training as a precursor, instead of just phonics, so that the distinguishing-the-sounds part of reading would make more sense. The sounds should not sound the same, unless there is some underlying phonological processing issue. This is part of what Lindamood is supposed to remediate.
And on phonics and Chinese: I did once see a student who appeared to have a language-based learning disability (of which dyslexia is the most familiar example), compounded by a very complex language environment (multiple dialects of Chinese at home, but no English, and multiple languages in school, including English, a middle eastern language, and an eastern European language). In the team meeting, I was struck by how similar the presentation of one of the parents was to the child, in contrast to their high professional achievement level. I remember wondering to myself if the low-phonetic nature of written Chinese might have allowed this parent to progress through the Chinese educational and professional academic system without any obstacles from hidden dyslexic tendencies, up until becoming a visiting scholar in the USA forced them to confront their language weaknesses in the form of English. Not that the individual was acknowledging the weakness, as the English-poor, professional parent kept insisting that the other parent didn't speak much English, although it was patently clear from a brief conversation with both of them that the reverse was true.
This long anecdote just to explain why I started observing hidden family histories of reading disabilities in the immigrant parents of children with possible reading disabilities, and hypothesizing that our view of RD as a disability is significantly an outgrowth of our phonetic language. (No real data, but someone could make a nice little PhD dissertation out of it, I expect.) I suspect that if we could experimentally raise dyslexics in low-phonetic language societies, quite a few of them would not appear disabled.
