Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It&#x27;s often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same &quot;whole language&quot; method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back to the same &quot;guessing game&quot;. Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome.<p>When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people &quot;this is an alphabet&quot; to &quot;this is how to use words and sentences in that language&quot;. That might make sense if you&#x27;re using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it&#x27;s just pronounced like &quot;ss&quot; when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ <i>significantly</i> from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they&#x27;re different compared to yours.<p>I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that&#x27;s an alphabet with not even that many extra&#x2F;fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.