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Notes -
Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?
It seems that how French speaking kids learn to read is the obvious question- French being a language with similar orthographic problems to English.
And American kids taught using the whole word method are taught their letters, but not necessarily the way they go together to make sounds. They’re expected to memorize ‘sight words’ that need to be recognized on sight and not to parse individual letters.
FWIW, "sight words" can complement phonics, it doesn't have to replace them. I think it's actually a good thing both for some tricky spelling, and for quicker reading -- as long as it doesn't exclude phonics.
Sadly, there was a similar movement in Germany, where regarding spelling they allowed all manner of misspelling -- as long as it "looked like it would sound" (which doesn't really make sense as a concept). This has led to a ton of kids who can't spell properly, for no apparent gain (and lasting surprisingly late in life). It's really annoying. I see it in my kids, where I'm a much better German speller, even if they are better speakers (as they are native, and I'm not).
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Yes, just like pretty much all European languages, except English and French. But I think even French spelling is more regular than English. (To nitpick: it isn't pronounced phonetically, but written phonetically)
Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere. But probably not, just like the concept of "spelling bee" contests makes no sense and they don't exist for non-English, European languages (elsewhere I don't know). It's useful to think about, in order to understand how fundamentally human this topic is and how far reaching the conclusions can be.
Yes, there has been a long-standing controversy in France about "méthode globale" (whole word method) as opposed to "méthode syllabique" (phonics), with the first being considered the modern, progressive approach and the second the traditional, no-nonsense one.
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