So how is it that Chinese kids learn to read?
Just throw’in bombs. All my kids learned phonics because they were home schooled.
The stereotype is not entirely true. Large numbers of asians in the bay area who’ve been here their entire lives and still speak marginal English.
The Latin alphabet, and its Greek and Hebrew predecessors, were designed and evolved to be phonetic. The shape of a particular written word indicates the word’s sound, and has absolutely nothing to do with its meaning.
Chinese is logographic, or ideographic. The shape of a written word relates to that word’s meaning, regardless of whether the word is pronounced in Mandarin, Cantonese, some other Chinese language, or even Japanese.
It makes perfect sense Chinese children are taught ‘whole-word’ reading because their written language was designed and evolved as such. It makes no sense to teach English in this way.
Perhaps there is so much similarity between Chinese and English that it give the Asians an unfair advantage over the Hispanics whose language is totally different. (Do I really need the sarcasm tag?)