Read the WSJ link for why things may not be as simple as this. It turns out that only about half of of English word spelling makes sense phonetically. IMO if you can work out half the words with a relatively simple repeatable system that's a win, but that's not good enough by itself because English spelling conveys meaning not just sound. (Eg the s at the end of dogs and cats, one sounds like an z the other sounds like an s but the use of the s itself adds meaning to the word so we spell both with an s)
That's right, and once you are 'winning' the rest is easy (just look up any word you don't know in the dictionary). But what if you
aren't winning? What if you are taught
not to figure out unfamiliar words because the same rules might not apply to all of them? I'll tell you what happens - you never learn the most important skill, how to read unfamiliar text by yourself.
Ultimately learning to read English requires you to recognize whole words in a way that isn't that much different than cartographic alphabets like Chinese.
You make it sound like Chinese isn't phonetic. In fact that's only half true.
Phonetic Components: The Secret Trick to Guessing the Pronunciation of Chinese Characters.
At first glance, the many strokes that compose a Chinese character don’t look like they give out many hints as to how they are to be pronounced. In fact, for a long time, you were expected to connect the strokes of characters to the sounds they refer to by sheer rote memorization. But, this is no longer the case. The Chinese know something you don’t and we’re going to let you in on their big secret: Chinese characters do represent sound, thanks to phonetic components. Phonetic components are indications the character contains on its pronunciation.
You can break down the characters yourself, or look at a Chinese dictionary, like Ninchanese’s. The dictionary will show you how the character can be decomposed, and allow you to look up the different elements in the character.
What can you expect to see?
Most of the time (over 80% of the time), the character you’ll be looking at will be a picto-phonetic character.
This is the most common way of forming characters. In fact, more than 80% of all Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters.
Chinese characters are also used in Japanese and Korean, but these languages are strongly phonetic even though they use pictograms.
The majority of English words can be be broken down phonetically once you know how to pronounce the component parts. English borrows from many other languages with different rules, so it may
seem like a lot of words are not phonetic when they are. However many foreign words have been
anglicised to make them easier to spell in English. Americans take it one step further - we change the spelling of
English words to match the pronunciation, eg. color vs colour, eon vs aeon, center vs centre, check vs cheque.
But even for other English speakers it's not that hard once you know that eg. 'tre' is pronounced 'ter' or 'our' is often pronounced 'or'. You will probably get 'Viscount' wrong if you don't know how the French pronounce it, but it's not a biggy. More important is how could you possibly know (without sufficient context) that it
is was the name of an airplane?
The most important thing about reading is not how to pronounce words, but what they
mean. You can often deduce the meaning from the context, but it helps if the word can be broken down into components that build up the full meaning. That is why Greek and Latin - which are strongly phonetic - were chosen for scientific and technical literature.
Pronunciation can be a bit of a problem where people are reading words instead of hearing them. In some cases the 'correct' pronunciation is not even agreed on by experts. For example in computing the words 'gif' (pronounced 'jif' according to its
inventor) and 'Linux' (pronounced 'li·nuhks' according to
Linus Torvald himself) are often the subject of debate. Clearly many people have decided what these words sound like from how they are written, not spoken. However despite the pronunciation ambiguities, nobody is confused about what these words
mean. And with 99% of communications referencing them being in written form, most of the time it
doesn't matter how they are pronounced.
As for the 'whole word' thing, that's nonsense. Nobody recognizes the word
antidisestablishmentarianism or
acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) by simply looking at the whole thing. If words weren't meant to be phonetic they would consist of mixtures of characters designed to be easily distinguishable by shape, not sound. We would communicate using
emoticons and
ascii art.
