How did you learn to read?
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.
- 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.
My parents read to me every night before bed. I assume that was the primary way. I was better at reading than most people at my grade level and have a larger vocabulary than most people I know as I continue to read to this day. I purposefully dumb myself down when talking to most people for relatability/because I'm in sales. That sounds more stuck up than I intend, but there is something to be said about "speaking like everyone else" to avoid ostracisation.
To avoid what now?
Ostracisation. It means to become an ostrich.
I suspect they meant ostracism.
Suspect they meant what?
I'm sorry I couldn't help it given the content of their comment.
You mess up big words so everyone thinks you're normal. It doesn't take rocket appliances.
I used to do this and describe it as, “I adjust my language for the audience”, when I realized I was saying people were dumb. Vocabulary has more to do with what you’ve read and the people you have been around than any kind of intelligence check.
That’s a great skill to have, by the way. It lets you connect with a larger variety of people and is really useful if you ever do any public speaking.
Yeah, that's definitely the much better way to put it and how I would say in a professional setting.
One of the ways I really strengthened my reading was playing Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Since my older sister played them, I imitated her and grew up to love both series. And of course to get good at either game, you need to read a lot of text. The downside is that the translations in Dragon Warrior used faux medieval language - so I went to school talking with thee and thou art in my regular vocabulary :D
Came here to say this. RPGs were an excellent way for young minds to understand how context, contractions, compound words and humour through text worked. I'm super thankful for simple, relatable and exciting stories from the games of my youth.
I think a lot of non-native speakers of English, like myself, also learnt much of their English from video games. For me, it was text and graphical adventures. If you ever thought that puzzles in Infocom, Sierra and Lucasarts games were maddeningly hard, try playing them with a pocket dictionary in one hand and a complete lack of understanding of any of the cultural context in the other. Fun!
Oh wow, that's awesome. After turning Gabriel Knight on over emulator a while back, I'm reminded of how plot and dialogue heavy these were. Which were the most useful games for you?
I would say Sierra titles like King's Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, as well as Infocom's text adventures. And the adaptation of Fredrik Pohl's Gateway. Basically anything with a text parser.
But the more mouse driven adventure games were important as well. Gabriel Knight is one of my favourites, such a brilliant game.
I was the product of a couple of eccentric teachers, so they experimented with the then-popular How To Teach Your Baby To Read Doman method. But instead of flash card drills, my dad made pen-and-ink drawings of sound-alike fanciful creatures, objects, machines, etc. on cards with corresponding letters, phonemes, and words. These were often incredibly funny. He stuck them all over the house - I couldn't go to bed without looking at pictures and words as I went to sleep.
They read to me constantly - the news at breakfast, and books at bedtime. Not just kids' books - my folks would read aloud whatever interested them (though my dad figured The Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings series were family entertainment). My mother tape-recorded stories for me if she couldn't be there to read herself. It also didn't hurt that the house was practically insulated with books, and they never restricted what I could choose to read.
I'm not sure what the first book I read for myself was, but I was proud of myself for finishing Charlotte's Web in a day when I was four years old. I don't think I've gone a day without reading since.
I don't remember any of this but it's what my parents tell me. When I was three, they asked me what I'm hoping Santa brings me for Christmas. I had for some reason said a computer. They had chuckled and said that Santa probably won't bring a computer since you can't read yet (this is the early 80s so in order to use a computer you need to be able to read and type). And Santa indeed didn't bring me a computer.
Fast forward a year later and when they asked me the same question again, I had replied that I want a computer because now I know how to read. Apparently, I had taught myself to read that summer.
And I still didn't get a computer. Santa's mean.
This made me smile because for me, it would be the English rather than French spelling that is completely nuts. I mean, sure, French is bonkers as well, but English is almost starting to border on something like Chinese where you just end up memorising the spelling of every word individually because the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation feels so random. Of course, it's not random at all and there are very reasonable historical reasons for why English spelling is what it is, but I do feel for every English speaking kid who struggles to learn to read and write.
I grew up speaking Finnish, which is both quite straightforward in its sound-to-letter correspondence, as well as quite poor in its phonetic inventory, so it's a relatively easy language to learn to read and write. I also didn't have much of a dialect, but spoke close to the written standard, which is sort of a made up version of Finnish used in writing and by news readers and such. Hence I suppose the four-year-old me being able to figure it out so easily (I'm sure I had help as well): you basically just need to learn 29 symbols*, about a third of which aren't really even used, and a couple of special rules.
* Edit: Well, more like 58 symbols in reality, since you do need to know both capital and lowercase letters, I suppose. And some of the lowercase letters even have multiple common variations. The Latin script is weird. And on top of that, we also use a totally different script to indicate numbers. But not always. Bizarre.
I think that’s why learning to read English just involves a lot of exposure to seeing written words and hearing someone read them aloud to you. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but consistent exposure builds the pathways in your brain to intuitively know what each word is.
I learned to read from sitting in bed with my dad and my sister while they read the Harry Potter books together. I was too young to read on my own, but just being able to look at the page and hear the words while they read helped me out a ton.
That must have helped a lot!
English spelling really has some wacky rules that you need to internalise, and a lot of it comes from just exposure. My favourite is the Es that don't represent a sound of their own but indicate the quality of a vowel a couple of letters earlier (cf. "bit" vs "bite"). This means that your brain has to look at the whole word holistically, rather than just moving one letter at a time. It's this sort of patterns that you probably best learn through repeated exposure, like you did with your parents. Or then you have to learn school mnemonics, like the "I before E except after C" rule, and repeat that until it becomes automatic.
The underlying issue, I suppose, is that the Latin script is not a very good fit for modern English. 26 letters are used to represent something like 24 consonant and 20 vowel sounds. It's a bit like trying to fit a square block in a round hole. Now, compare this with the young Finnish speaking me, who had 29 letters to learn for a language that only uses something like 13 consonants and 8 vowels. Each sound can therefore have a corresponding letter, and each letter just a single corresponding sound (well, with one exception). And a third of the symbols aren't even used.
Or, rather, that's one major issue with English spelling. The other is that unlike with many other languages that repeatedly revise spelling rules, English spelling hasn't kept up with language change, and English today is basically written as it was spoken something like 600 years ago.
While this definitely makes a sensible English spelling system harder conceptually, I don't think it's remotely the underlying issue. Other Germanic languages with similarly large phoneme inventories are able to have much more consistent systems.
The principal underlying reason the English spelling system is this way is that it has not changed significantly for a very long time. You mention this at the end of your comment, but I wanted to emphasize and elaborate on how big a factor it is. English spelling began to be standardized in the 1500s, which means that it generally doesn't reflect sound changes that happened after that, like the Great Vowel Shift -- this is the shift that resulted in the way we write "bit" vs "bite"! The "e" used to represent an actual short e sound at the end of the word that was eventually lost, but had the effect of causing the preceding vowel to be long. The Great Vowel Shift then involved long vowels (which were previously just longer versions of the same vowel sounds as their short counterparts) turning into various diphthongs -- such as /iː/ becoming /ɑ͡ɪ/ as in "bit" and "bite." A ton of major sound changes like this have happened in those hundreds of years, and the English orthography simply never changed to reflect them -- German went through a similar vowel shift to the English Great Vowel Shift slightly earlier, but the spelling was changed accordingly: "bīzen" became "beißen." The earliest versions of modern German and Dutch spelling were mostly standardized in the 18th century, which means they reflect something much closer in time to the modern language than is the case with English spelling.
Nowadays it's likely too late to actually change English spelling to reflect all these sound changes. The biggest factor there is simply the sheer amount of printed English-language material that you would need to re-print, since any spelling reform would have to make some pretty drastic changes to come close to its goal. But another is that English is not just spoken by people on one island as it was in the 1500s. Even attempting to come up with a spelling reform that could be consistently used by both Brits and Americans would be difficult, as even major dialects within those countries have different numbers of vowels, and the differences in phonology between them are not trivial. A replacement system that worked for both would either have to merge a ton of distinct vowels into one written form for many speakers, making it ambiguous in many cases, or other speakers would have to learn when to write different forms for vowel distinctions they themselves do not make, which just brings us back to the same memorization issues the current orthography has. And that's without taking into account a larger variety of world Englishes, of which there are many with a huge diversity in their vowel inventories!
You are absolutely right, English's reluctance to reflect language change in its spelling rules is a bigger issue than its limited symbol inventory.
And so, some of these wacky rules that came about for historical reasons have also become productive rules. Continuing with the "e" example, when bicycles were invented and they came up with the shortened word /baɪk/, it came to be spelled "bike". Not that it probably could have been anything else at that point, given the system. Although something like "bighk" could have been fun (cf. "light")?
It's indeed likely too late for a spelling reform. In theory though, I suppose there is a third alternative to the ones you propose: a reform where there is no standardised spelling of words and you just spell words like you speak them. In theory at least, we can understand speakers from other dialects, so we should also be able to understand writers from other dialects. If I recall correctly, that's somewhat how it used to work in Middle English, before the printing press changed things. In my native Finnish, some people do that in private communication, writing in their own dialect, while others don't, instead sticking to the somewhat artificial Standard Finnish in their spelling. I for some reason belong to the latter group.
I don't think this necessarily holds -- unless the spelling systems are designed in parallel in order to work well together (and honestly even then) it's very possible for even dialects that are very similar to have big differences in how they're written that make it so you essentially have to learn each system separately. Our brains are doing a lot of unconscious work when it comes to understanding spoken language that doesn't translate when it comes to a system for writing that language. English's status as a global language is a big hindrance here -- while there were plenty of dialect differences back in the era of Middle English before standardized spelling, English was much less spread out and there was far less need for written communication with someone who spoke very differently from you.
I will confess that I've tried to come up with my own new English orthography for fun, and it's surprisingly hard to sort out even just the variation within American English without making decisions that privilege how some people speak over others.
So, what I had in mind was a system that just records sounds. It would be the same for all dialects. Basically, like IPA. Or any spelling system with a fairly strict and straightforward letter to phoneme correspondence.
It seems to work for languages like Finnish, allowing people to write in their own dialects. Sort of, kind of. It's not and never can be a perfect one to one replication of spoken language, of course. But a robust phonetic system is typically quite flexible: I entertained myself in high school by writing my physics class notes in hiragana, i.e. used a Japanese script for notes written in Finnish, and I can of course also write Japanese with the Latin script using Finnish orthographic rules. Some information is lost but enough transmits to remain understandable.
Anyway, as discussed, like any English spelling reform, it would require an unprecedented coordinated effort from multiple countries and hundreds of millions of people to change the writing system. So, not likely.
Sounds fun! Would you use a Latin based script or invent a completely new symbol set?
This is not possible. Different English dialects sound too different to use the same writing system that directly represents the sounds they make. Even if you ignore dialects other than standard British and American English (which imo you shouldn't do anyway), there are huge differences in pronunciation between them. Their phonologies have diverged too much over time -- a system that directly represents the sounds in one cannot represent the sounds in another. Even within standard American English, there are differences in the number of vowel phonemes between speakers from different regions. Do you write "cot" and "caught" the same way, or differently? How about "marry," "merry," and "Mary"? Whatever choice you make, it will not be neutral and it will mean your system does not directly represent the sounds people make.
And if the solution if for everyone to just write exactly how they speak, well, you're still going to force speakers who don't make a distinction between certain sounds to memorize where each is used in order to be able to read others' writing. The ability to learn to read other people's work without having to learn the idiosyncrasies of how they represent things is the purpose of standardized spelling. IPA works because it was intended to document phonemes for academic study, but not as an actual orthography for a language like English -- and that's without even touching on how the same sounds can be conceived of differently under different analyses! Even a fairly broad transcription of various English dialects would differ enough between even major dialects that it would be an endeavor to learn to read British or Australian English as an American if a system like that were used. It would obscure relationships between words relative to our current system. I don't know how far apart dialects in Finnish are, but I don't think a system like this
I've learned some Shavian and Quikscript for fun in the past (the former was my first exposure to the difficulty of writing English with a system that distinguished phonemes that aren't distinguished in your dialect), but when I attempted to come up with my own orthography, I attempted to come up with a Latin-based one that relied as much as possible on existing English spelling rules. Representing "long" vs "short" vowels using the number of consonants and silent e works fine, for instance, and just would need to be standardized. My biggest hurdle was the one I mentioned above -- even relying heavily on existing English spelling made it difficult to try and make a system that didn't overtly privilege one major dialect over another.
This is indeed what I had in mind. People would write their "marrys" and "merrys" and "Marys" as they pronounce them. For some they would all be the same spelling, for others not. Like I wrote earlier, this hinges on people actually understanding each other's dialects.
Note that this wouldn't force anyone to stick to just one dialect. It would allow the same kind of code switching and register shifting strategies that people employ in spoken language. This is what I anecdotally see happening in languages that use more phonemically focused writing systems.
Let me emphasise though that I don't believe this to be in any way practically possible for English. As I believe we have established, for a spelling reform to happen for English, something monumental would need to happen, and this approach would not just change the spelling of things but much of the underlying assumptions of the current English writing system. So, we are talking hypotheticals. I just offered a third hypothetical to the two that you proposed. The likelihood of this one happening is even smaller than the ones you suggested.
There is a fourth impossible hypothetical as well. If we take your assumption about the purpose of a writing system -- the "ability to learn to read other people's work without having to learn the idiosyncrasies of how they represent things" -- to some sort of an extreme, we could also argue for a Chinese style approach where the writing system doesn't care so much about pronunciation at all. English already does it with numbers, it would just need to expand it to everything else. And while at it, maybe we could take it even further and make the writing system not care about syntax or morphology, either. That would be a fun challenge. And also terribly impractical for day-to-day use, I'm sure. Not to mention impossible to implement.
But through hypotheticals like this, I end up wondering if perhaps English is already in some sort of a good enough sweet spot between something like the Chinese and Finnish systems. Its spelling more than hints at an intended pronunciation, but also comes with some kind of logographic qualities. Maybe, in the end, it is a near enough optimal solution for a global language with a wide range of dialects?
Going back to code switching and register shifting strategies, I suppose one could in a way argue that the current English writing system does exactly this. People switch to a standard pronunciation when writing. It just happens to be one that existed hundreds of years ago and that the writers themselves don't speak. It's not a million miles away from something like Finnish where, in public and official communication, people tend to write in a form of language that they actually never speak.
Yeah ultimately I think English is definitely more similar to Chinese characters than something like Finnish in terms of how well the writing reflects spoken language. Chinese characters also have elements that reflect pronunciation in them fwiw -- it's just that these phonetic components are based on how the words were pronounced a very long time ago.
I had a similar thought about French, though I'm a native English speaker, with only... medeocre to passable... French.
For English, I fully admit my native language is bonkers. I grew up reading a lot so it's not an unexpected scenario that I think a word is pronounced a certain way from reading, only to be corrected when I speak it out loud.
With French, certainly there are a lot of 'silent' letters and rules to learn, but I feel like I'm able to guess pronunciations for new words I encounter reasonably well for my proficiency (at my level, I can read, say, the news, but still need to search individual words somewhat frequently).
Related to French phonetics, I get a real kick out of casual francophone forums, as many phrases are abbreviated extremely phonetically, so I'll see a string of letters new to me, but if I say them out loud I understand the meaning.
Pokemon Yellow and other games.
I was a late-bloomer with reading, and really struggled early on. I think some of my earliest memories of anxiety actually started around school in kindergarten. Kids that could effortlessly read the Mr. Men series while I could barely spell. Brute forcing my way through RPGs could only take me so far without knowing more context so I eventually picked it up. Then I was the most prolific reader in middle school. Won the schoolwide competition for books in a year multiple years in a row.
I remember my dad teaching me how to read before I started Kindergarten, and always loved reading! I remember in 4th grade we had this board we could pin things on for every book we read, but they had to be minimum 100 pages long or something. Except the books I was reading were like Redwall, that were separated into 3 "books", and I asked if I could use each of those as a book since each "book" was more than 100 pages. 😂
But anyways, he taught me to read just by sounding out letters and practicing with me. I guess it came pretty naturally.
When i was in first year of elementary school, we learned individual letters, first the sound, then writing them a whole bunch as an exercise. I've had some previous experience with just single characters too, from building blocks with letters on them and whatnot, so that part was pretty easy for me, but i couldn't grasp the concept of actually reading full words. Unusually vivid memory for me from that part of childhood is sitting in the living room for a really long time before my parents understood what i was struggling with and started being like "Okay, can you read this character? What about this one? And this? Okay, now what if you read them all together quickly?" and then it finally clicked for me. First language has an ortography that very strongly follows pronunciation, so there wasn't much to learn after that.
I have bitched about my family many times on Tildes but my early childhood education is one area where they really invested in me. Everyone in my family, including grandparents, read to me. And while I don’t have memories of this, my sister says they bought hooked on phonics. As a result I learned to read very early and it catapulted my educational progress.
That was something of a mixed bag. Being an educationally gifted youth in public school can be painful. It meant that I was bored out of my mind for weeks because I finished books that my peers were reading as a group aloud the same day we got it. It meant I would actually read the textbook in other subjects and quickly grasp the ideas meaning I was bored in those classes too. It probably would have been better if I didn’t move so much as a kid and stayed in one school, because then I would have been able to stick with a single GATE program to keep me occupied.
I really liked the book "Green Eggs And Ham". My older sister read it to me so many times that I memorized it. I wanted to play a trick on people and fool them into thinking I could read. I recited the book while turning the pages. I got a lot of kind attention for that early joke. It inspired me to do the gag on my own, many times, associating the sound with the text in my brain. That is how I learned how to read.
Pokemon red! I never liked books, it took the motivation to catch em all too get me hooked on language. I'd go to my mom when I hit a word I didn't know.
My child learned to read by sitting on my lap while I played Pokemon Yellow.
Aww! My pokemon yellow memory is it's the first thing I ever ordered off the internet. I remember being so so excited for it to arrive in the mail.
Never did manage to get my folks into gaming. Handed my dad my steam deck with balatro and he liked it but not a ton. He was way into VR, knowing him he'd get super into it for a month then drop it hah
Different perspective : 0-5 left alone for very long stretches of the day with lots of manga, Traditional Chinese language.
I distinctly remember being able to read fairly well by the time i entered grade 1 already, so I'll talk about before then. I was left at grandparents' a lot for vast stretches of the day, or else at home with a sibling who wasn't into reading. Older sibling comes home with textbooks though so that's cool. My mom would also go out for lunches with friends/relatives a lot on weekends, and would buy us book to keep quiet. So a lot of my early childhood reading was matching characters to pictures, and I wouldn't have any idea how to sound out the characters. In my head they would be "pronounced" like a similiar character or part of the character, until I get an audio correction from say, the news, tv captions, or hearing others use the same turn of phrase spoken out loud.
Silly memory: I thought eclipses were read out loud, like "look at all those chicken..." Would be read as "look at all those chicken (chicken chicken chicken)" like an echo hahaha. And I thought speech bubbles with a long dash meant they were shouting, which, is incidentally true a lot of the times in manga lol.
In terms of school, there's a ton of "everyone reading the same thing, lots of times" from kindergarten so I would imagine most people learn to read by matching sound to sight and then repeated lots.
I went to an extra grade level between Kindergarten and first grade, which was known as Junior Primary where I lived at that time (east Tennessee). This grade level was created for children who were deemed not ready for first grade. In my case, I was deemed not emotionally mature enough for first grade (I had recently gone through a traumatizing experience and I cried all the time), but nearly all of my classmates were there because they had struggled with reading fundamentals in Kindergarten, so that's what our team of teachers focused on.
What I recall is an all-day regime of total reading immersion. We did lots of phonetics, lots of whole-language reading, lots of listening to adults read books, lots of watching shows and cartoons about reading, lots of singing reading- and spelling-related songs, lots of writing practice, lots of drawing pictures to illustrate stories we wrote or listened to, etc. Our teachers moved us around a lot so that we were doing these activities in different places: in different classrooms, outside, sometimes even in the hallways.
I remember that we never spent very long on any one activity or stayed long in any one place, so it felt like we were constantly doing something new. I remember it being very fun — a lot more fun than Kindergarten had been, and certainly a lot more fun that first grade turned out to be — and I came out of it capable of reading and writing well beyond a first grade level.
Some of these activities I did in school turned into hobbies I did outside of school. In particular, I loved writing and illustrating "books". My parents would take a few pages of printer paper, fold them over, and staple them down the fold, and they always kept a few of these on hand. Whenever I had to tag along on some boring errand, like going to the supermarket or the bank, they would give me a blank booklet and some markers, and I would entertain myself. When I finished filling my booklet, they would make a big show of reading it out loud to each other and showing each other the pictures, exactly like my teachers in school read picture books to us, and they would put it with my library of prior literary works (they really talked it up, like I was a real author). I was very proud.
i learned phonics at age 3, though i suspect my mom actually started me sooner than that bc she got tired of me constantly asking her to read me things. i think i was reading early readers by 4 or so and after that i just kinda....ran with it? i dont think anyone ever taght me to read in the sense that I was supposed to read the words on the page in a specific order to maximise my retention.
That said, i am an excellent speed-reader, and a terrible comprehension reader. I read fast af but i only retain like ~50% of it. its not really a problem in the day to day, i can skim through work-related reading material like nobodys business, and since most of that stuff just requires me to follow directions, skimming for the general concept is actually way more helpful than reading for complete comprehension.
it does mean though, that if im reading for fun, ill enjoy the heck out of a book, but i wont be able to tell you a thing about it other than "this was a cool book, i liked it a lot, you should check it out" which for some reason has never really sold anyone on anything ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ (like for example, i read Iron Widow semi-recently. There were mechs, it was kinda like darling in the franxx except less....uhhh...Weird (iykyk), the main character was a complete badass, and i 10000% support womens wrongs in her case specifically. Also the love triangle was solved with poly(!! yes!! fantastic!!). Anyway thats pretty much the entirety of what i remember about it. Excellent book, 10/10 i recommend it!)
My parents told me that I wasn't really reading well and had fallen behind other students in kindergarten and 1st grade. I don't remember that, but I do remember not having any interest in schoolwork. I do clearly remember sometime in 2nd grade we couldn't go to recess for some reason and had to find something to do indoors, so on a whim I picked up one of those red ball books and looked at the pictures and started to sound out the words and it suddenly started to click. I think I just needed to figure it out on my own without a teacher trying to force me into it before I could really start to learn. Once I did though I really got into it, early comic strip books also helped a ton to keep me interested before getting into novels later.
I have no memory of learning, but I was very young and was reading books before I started school. I know that my mom read to me before bed, and I have a very, very fuzzy memory of sitting with her and following along the story with my finger, but I do not know how she actually taught me. I should ask her! I absolutely devoured any book I could get my hands on as a kid, so she did a good job of instilling a love of reading early on. As far as official schooling, all I really remember is learning stuff like diagraming sentences.
My mother made a deck of cards with letters and she would scramble the deck and we would go over each card and what letter is it. I absolutely hated it and remember crying about it but it didn't affect my joy of reading even if the first steps were shit/10. I appreciate the effort she made for us to learn to read since it would have been horrible to learn it at school.
My mother read to us, probably not daily because she was never very methodical. I had an older sibling who I was obsessed with being as good as in everything, so I was determined to read and write at an early age. (I do remember this, I have strong memories going as young as age 2.)
When I was 4, my mother subscribed to a service that sent Dr. Seuss books at some interval (probably more often than monthly but I don't remember.) I do remember impatiently waiting for each book to arrive, opening it and figuring it out for myself. I was able to do this for every book except "To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street," which had a word that I could not figure out on my own and drove me nuts. My mother used to say my first word was "I do it by myself!" and true to that I never did ask for help. I do remember going back to it some time later and realizing it was all easy to me and feeling accomplished.
I am not sure exactly how I figured all those books out on my own, but I think the order they were sent was deliberate, to build on previously acquired vocabulary, and of course they have a lot of pictorial support. Also, I was watching Sesame Street and The Electric company. And even though my mother probably didn't read to us every night, she absolutely loved books, and that was no doubt contagious. We had all kinds of cool books on science and history that I would look at the pictures of long before I could actually read them.
Somebody taught me to sign my drawings with my given name. I proceeded to ask about all the letters and numbers around us a lot.
Then my uncle proceeded to teach me how to reuse the letters I knew to write swear words. I might have been 4-5. Then I used them in kindergarten.
Like... "Oh sweetie, what did you write here?" "F*ck off." Also the classic paper opening window where upon opening instead of curtains or inside house "Stop ogling!" was there.
Then I ask my mom to read my kids encyclopedia about blood cells every night. I was hooked on the French TV series about metabolism. Then she got me more, about various myths and legends and so on.
Then I got hooked on this book from Ondřej Sekora and eventually (6yo) started reading through the beefy Sci-Fi and Fantasy sections of our family collection.
As for the English reading, I was driving my English teacher insane by ignoring him and assigned work and just reading through his lessons. English books. I think Hobbit and then English version of The Three Musketeers. And later Sir Terry Pratchett.
I don't remember learning to read, but from what my parents say it was basically a case of exposure and repetition - Mum read books to me every night from a very young age. She also at some point started pointing the words she went to highlight what word was associated with which sound.
I do remember primary school used a system called Jolly Phonics to teach reading but I recall very little else about that as I was generally reading one of the books from the side cabinet rather than paying attention.
After acquiring the initial skill of reading I mainly developed it by working through a steady supply of novels. Aside from the classic pitfall of deducing alternative pronunciations of a few words which I later had to train myself out of after discovering the correct pronunciation (e.g. epitome and tome are not similar) this worked reasonably well as a way to develop spelling and vocabulary.
When I was very young my mom did a lot of reading, and often read her books to me. I was in a Montessori school before first grade, where I had both an English and a French teacher reading all sorts of books to me along with doing phonics and spelling and all that, too. After about third grade I got into my dad's shelf of science fiction, and from there I just always had a book I was reading really up until today. The subject matter has changed a ton but the act of reading is something I never stopped doing.
Grade school was a weird experience because I often got in some sort of trouble over reading. I did not enjoy most of what got assigned, and a lot of the time was spent just sitting at the desk while they had other folks read aloud. No shade at the kids but man did it bore the hell out of me to be stuck on the same paragraph for ten, fifteen minutes at a time. I'd end up in trouble because the boredom would get to me, id pull out my own book, and the teacher usually got kinda pissed I wasn't doing what was assigned. It always felt kinda ironic to get lectured at over that while I could see posters with smiling cartoons about how great and awesome reading was.
I never really got into what was assigned, either - I couldn't relate to what the authors were trying to communicate a lot of the time, and my teachers weren't able to really help with that. I avoided a lot of that sort of literature until much later as a result, and did have a stretch where I found it more difficult to do any reading, because of how much I was being made to do outside where my actual interest was.
That's the formative part I suppose. I felt I really expanded on my ability to read when I got to college, because there I was faced with a lot of dense, difficult stuff that really took a while to process and put together. Philosophy in particular was like being in the high gravity training machine - tons of words id never seen that didn't have settled meanings, prolonged thoughts that required keeping a lot in mind all at once, Hegel, etc. The most difficult exercise was to work through a page of Kant in the original German. I did not know German. It took me forever and a half (and it wasn't even a very good page) but it sure did open my eyes to how other folks could bend and use language, which I think helped out in the long run. If anything, looking back it feels like a two stage process of learning to read - I learned to read in a literal sense, did it for entertainment mostly, then got into the trenches and learned a deeper sort of reading, that changed profoundly how I engaged with any written material. I came to look at a book more like an elongated thought/a full conversation, rather than an object of entertainment, and that's when I could revisit some of those former assignments and get something nice from them.
I remember not getting anything at all until they started specifically teaching us in school. The teacher taught us the rules of what letters made what sounds and it all made sense more or less. I struggled for a short period and then just read.
My parents kind of said something similar. They had me reading some early reading book and struggled for a little bit and then just read the book and then read another one and... just read.
I think part of why this was easy is a couple of things. First, when we were young my parents had flash cards for us to learn vocabulary (nothing crazy) so I had a strong mental dictionary of words I'm expecting things to be. Second, I think its just how I'm wired; I liked rules so give me some rules on how to figure out words and I was like... wow, this makes so much sense.
My mom read to me every night when I was an infant through kindergarten. I don't remember much from back then, but I do remember her using "Hooked on Phonics" with me. It helped a lot. Eventually, we progressed to reading together. I remember being proud of being able to read my favorite book in kindergarten, "Stellaluna."
I ended up being an avid reader as a result. But apparently, in 4th grade, when everyone was first reading the Harry Potter books, my 4th grade teacher thought it was too difficult for me and wanted to discourage me from reading it. I did it anyway. I got in trouble in that class for reading ahead in the class book too (Where the Red Fern Grows).
I was always reading ahead in the class book. Listening to some kid sounding out two-syllable words was torturous, and whenever I'd get called on to read aloud I'd have ask where we were. There was always a book in my desk for when I finished classwork early.
I learned to read very early, and I know my parents read to me. I could navigate MS-DOS well enough as a 4-year-old to launch the game "Castle Adventure". I was very bad at the game and pretty much always died to a snake. But I don't remember learning to read because that happened before I have solid memories. I do remember that they struggled to accomodate me at school: in kindergarten, on Wednesdays, they sent me to read with 3rd graders while the other kids were learning the very basics. And I frequently got in trouble for reading under my desk after quickly finishing classwork all through elementary school.