English Hieroglyphics are fun and easy to read

Rantrave.com ^ | September 22, 2013 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

[Summary: easy way to understand sight-words.] Hey, wait a minute, you're thinking. There's no such thing as English hieroglyphics. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian hieroglyphics, maybe some others. But English? No way.

Yeah, you know that. But does a six-year-old kid know that? Not hardly. You know what this means? The school system can pull a fast one. Teachers point to a word-– "house" -– and say, "This design is pronounced 'house.' Memorize it."

Presto, that English phonetic word is now English hieroglyphics, simply by saying it is. That's what American public schools did circa 1930; they changed all English phonetic words into English hieroglyphics. It was so easy. What do first graders know? They've got VICTIM written all over them.

If children learn the alphabet, they are in fact memorizing the shapes of individual letters. But a single letter is not so great a challenge; plus, there are only 26 of them.

But what about five of these easy shapes stuck together to make a much more complicated shape like "house"? Or, worse still, something like "business." What about this complex shape makes you think of business activity? Basically, that's how you learn hieroglyphics, one at a time, with as many memory aids as possible.

If you don't happen to have a photographic memory, you will have to be clever and creative with your mnemonic tricks. Let's say the word is "face." Both the "a" and the "e" have a closed shape that could very well be eyes. That's how you do it.

The problem with hieroglyphics is that each design is hard work and takes up lots of memory. Even very smart people have trouble memorizing 2000 hieroglyphics with instant recall. More ordinary memories might have trouble going past 500 hieroglyphics.

Treating English word as hieroglyphics has few benefits and many obvious limitations. The English language is huge. College graduates routinely know more than 100,000 English words. Nobody knows 100,000 hieroglyphics. Furthermore, having memorized "face," would you be able to read FACE? The eyes, where are the eyes?

Historically speaking, it was as though a strange and deadly virus struck our Education Establishment around 1930. They insisted-–absolutely, hysterically insisted--that memorizing English words as hieroglyphics was the best way to go. In fact, it's the worst way.

English hieroglyphics, that's what most little children studied and memorized across the United States for a long time. This method never made any sense. It caused huge damage. It's the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.

Virtually all readers of English hieroglyphics are damaged readers. Their eyes tend to flit randomly over the complex designs. Instead of relentless left-to-right movements, their eyes zigzag and jump backwards. Soon these readers are diagnosed as dyslexic. They are said to have ADHD; and must be given Ritalin.

No, what they need to be given is a lesson in phonics. They memorize the letter names. They learn the sounds (i.e., the phonics) represented by the letters. They learn the blends of these sounds. When children can combine two or more sounds into one sound, they are reading!

That's how it works. That's how simple it is, in every phonetic language all around the world. Once you know the letters and the sounds, there is no limit to the number of words you can read. That's why English can have 1 million words, some of them long and bizarre like "ibuprofen" and "verisimilitude," but readers have no trouble.

Conversely, children trying to memorize English as hieroglyphics might stumble over "See Dick and Jane." They might stumble over "house." After all, when you think of it as a design, house looks a lot like louse, hoist, horse, dowse, souse, mouse, host, hoses, worse, hurts, etc. Really, that is the primary problem with English hieroglyphics. Every one of them resembles 50 others. A kid could get dyslexia, never learn to read, drop out of school, and end up stealing a car belonging to a literacy professor. Well, at least that would be poetic justice.

And the moral of the story is: if your child comes home with a list of sight-words to be memorized, send the child back with a copy of this article and a request for an Individualized Education Program that is based on phonics.

--------Related material-------------

ARTICLE: "Sight Words--The Big Stupid" http://www.improve-education.org/id66.html

ARTICLE: "America, you've been punked." http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013091333189/life-and-science/health-and-education/america-you-have-been-punked.html

VIDEO: "Reading is Easy." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws

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[Dr. Sivana]

May I suggest that your phonics education is incomplete as most of the words you list are in fact phonetic.

I would suggest in turn that your definition of phonetic is a little more expansive than mine. You could pretend that every word is phonetic if you list all of the exceptions as regulars. For a seven year old, it is not very helpful.

I understand that "FOUR" rhymes with "POUR"; but it certainly does not rhyme with "FLOUR" or "SOUR". I just came up with a handful of very short words off the top of my head. If you read with children who are taught with phonics, as mine are, you will see these issues pop up with great frequency, and in many cases brute force memorization will have to come into play.

Any language that is not man-made (e.g. Esperanto), ordered into regularity by an academy or government (Finnish), or simply utterly primitive, is going to have these issues, usually with some basic or very old words (which is why the verb to be is irregular in so many languages).

My wife does the teaching, so I will mention the Spaulding site to her. Again, this is NOT a slam at phonics. Phonics is the foundation of being able to read nearly all western languages well. Once that foundation is built, reading itself fills things out. Over time, we do recognize patterns, as we no longer have to sound out each word as adult readers.

[muir_redwoods]

Words like “choir” and “night” the pronounciation of which bear no relationship to their spelling are taught that way until children learn the exception just to improve fluency. The bulk of words like “word”, “have”, “like” etc that follow spelling rules are taught with phonics.

[D Rider]

Don’t you know the eco-nuts back in the 1920s were freaking out over the possibility that the north and south poles were going to melt away?

There is a great graphic from the old farmers alminac Global Warming Timeline Graphic

I can see your point that whole word can be a re-run of a 1930's idea.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

RE: “Many parochial schools are not much different from public schools...”

This is a very important point. It’s so sad to see the Catholic schools corrupted by the deliberately dumb public schools.

The Catholic Church could make a huge contribution to this country by the simple device of having excellent schools.

First rule? Do not adopt any policy or method used in a public school. If you need a suggestion, call three private schools, ask what they’re doing, and go with the majority.

Okay, Catholics. Put some pressure on your nearest parochial schools.

[Valpal1]

I’ve taught phonics for 30 years and homeschooled my own four. Spalding is the most comprehensive. 70 phonograms and 30 spelling rules, 100 simple facts about the English language that are generally easy to memorize, so brute force shouldn’t be necessary. It’s quite easy to make it fun.

[Cronos]

Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.

[Dr. Sivana]

Not really — Polish, Marathi and Latin are pronounced how they are spelt.

I cannot speak for Polish or Marathi, but Latin is a bit messier. Many exceptions have been weeded out over the years (as they have in French by the Academié, which had the pretension to go back to "correct" Balzac, cf. "The Story of French"), but Virgil was well known for using an archaic vocabulary, which broke a number of conventions. I'll have to check my Allen and Greenough for specific examples.

Modern Ecclesiastical Latin is quite regularized, in large part because the Catholic Church standardized pronunciations not so very long ago (18th - 19th century?) before that time, English, French, Italian and other priests had different ways of pronouncing many words, until Rome stanmdardized on an Italianate pronunciation. English-speaking countries' "Legal" Latin of course has an entirely different pronunciation, tossing diphthongs in where they do not belong (Legal Latin "Venire" pronounced "Vehn-eye-ree" rather than "Vehn-eer-ay", for instance ... awful to the ear). Granted, each of these systems in modern times may have been consistent within themselves, so that might not be applicable to your argument. We do not know with certainty how the language was pronounced in ancient times, at best we have some good ideas as to how some prominent writers pronounced certain things, and we get some help from poetry. Even in modern Latin textbooks, macrons are often placed over the long e as a hint (to determine between ablative and other cases) which would be unnecessary if it were always pronounced as it is spelled.

I do understand that some of the Scandinavian countries or thereabouts were forcing a strict standardization. That probably works better with smaller, homogenized populations.

[KYGrandma]

While in China in July, I only learned to read one Chinese letter/figure? It was for toilet. I only learned it because the figure looked like a toilet. Except most of them were the squatting kind.