How very odd, Bruce. I had a completely different experience learning to read whole words, and took to it like a duck to water. By the time I was 11 I was reading on a college level. No one with whom I grew up had any reading problems whatsoever. And many of the kids had foreign parents.
How in the world do you explain this?
Seriously, if someone showed you a word you’d never seen before you wouldn’t know how to “sound it out” and pronounce it properly?
I was taught whole word in first grade, and was labeled a retard. In second grade an old school marme bucked the rules and taught me to read phonetically. This opened the world to me and I am currently employed as a high end well paid computer professional. That old lady opened the world to me and saved my life.
Anyone who would teach a phonetic language as pictographs is a fool. The only reason for it is that the state wants easily controlled, enslaved, illiterate retards, for their socialist utopia i.e. hell.
I for one am not going to allow those EVIL, DESPICABLE, INSECTS, lay one grasping claw on my grandson.
My grandkids aren’t even in school yet, and here’s a few years old “cute story”. Grandkid was riding in car with “other” grandparents, and remarked on a “big truck”. “Other” grandma, seeking to expand horizons, so to say, added, “It’s a HUGE truck”. GD ( OK, a girl ) tops it ... “It’s ENORMOUS”.
Some kids do just fine with just about any reading method, however some other kids need to have the words broken down by syllable in order to gain that skill. I had four kids. One was a poor reader and needed extra phonics help. Two were regular readers. And one asked me at the age of three what "park closed" meant after reading the sign to me.
Your kid taught himself phonics.
That was exactly my experience. I had no problems learning to read whole words. Once I discovered Hardy Boys novels there was no turning back.
Still, unlike some aggressive Phonics proselytizers, I am willing to accept that others may learn differently than I do.