How did you learn to read?

Carrie
2025-04-26T18:06:01Z

Question is as stated in the title. How did you learn to read?

I am re-listening to the great podcast, "Sold a Story" and it has prompted a lot of questions to myself, and now to others.

So, I'm curious, how did you learn to read and what do you remember about it? I am extra interested in people who have learned from "non-phonetic" languages, and also have a new curiousity about French, which I consider a language that does not match the spelling of its spoken and written words (if that makes sense, I'm sure that is my own bias there, as an English speaker).

My own reading experience

I can't recall how I learned to read as a baby baby, but I have a lot of pictures of me with books from a very young age.

I do remember being taught how to "read" aka how to take tests well that involved reading. For me I was taught like this:

Look at the questions following the written material. Keep those in your mind. Some of those have direct passages referenced, go to those passages.

When you are inside a paragraph, the topic sentence (first) tells you what the paragraph is about, and what point the author is trying to prove. The middle shit is usually examples and possibly useless, because the final sentence, is the conclusion, which reminds you of what the whole paragraph is about, and what you should think when you finish the paragraph.

OFC, this fits in neatly with the "five paragraph essay", which is introduction, three examples, conclusion. It's like recursive writing.

I want to talk about this way of learning to read, because I feel it really fucked with my ability to enjoy reading and my current attention span¹. These days, I feel my eyes almost follow this pattern instinctively, there's a lot of going around the paragraph non-linearly, it feels like scanning for "useful" information while also "discarding" useless information. It's almost like I only know how to skim now, but I can't tell. I also have ADHD, so I'm sure this affects my methods of reading.

However, since I learned this skill very early (at least at age 9), I can't help but wonder if the natural inclination was fueled up by this method of teaching, or what.

1. When I would read fictional material which has less rigidity, I also felt I was taught to figure out what the tester was going to ask about and focus on that versus actually enjoying reading. Basically all my joy for reading is messed up.

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