1/3 of US schools teach reading in a way that doesn't work.

[Roger Ramjets]

It's possible to mix and garble letters in words quite a bit without making a written text unintelligible:

Fro emxaple I ma suer yuo hvae no pborlme raedngi thsi, rghit?

None of you is deciphering phonems in the above line,

Again you miss the point. We are all experienced readers who know what the words should be from the context. We can quickly scan some text and just by picking out a few letters we already have a good idea of what most of the words (probably) are.

That does not apply to children who are learning to read.

But faced with an unfamiliar text you might not do so well. For example, here's part of the technical description of a device in the 1962 General Electric Instruments databook:-

FUNCTION

To measure inverse reactive current in unilateral phase detractors with display of percent realization.

OPERATION

Based on the principle of power generation by the modial interaction of magnetoreluctance and capacitive directance, the Turboencabulator negates the relative motion of conventional conductors and fluxes. It consists of a baseplate of prefabulated Amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two main spurving bearings are aligned with the pentametric fan.

Six gyro-controlled antigravic marzel-vanes are attached to the ambifacient wane shafts to prevent internal precession. Along the top, adjacent to the panandermic semi-boloid stator slots, are 47 manestically spaced grouting brushes, insulated with Glyptal-impregnated, cyanoethylated kraft paper bushings. Each one of these feeds into the rotor slipstream, via the non-reversible differential tremie pipes, a 5 per cent solution of reminative Tetraethyliodo-hexamine, the specific pericosity of which is given by P = 2.5C_n^6/7 where "C" is Cholmondeleys annular grillage coefficient and "n" is the diathetical evolute of retrograde temperature phase disposition.

The two panel meters display inrush current and percent realization. In addition, whenever a barescent skor motion is required, it may be employed with a reciprocating dingle arm to reduce the sinusoidal depleneration in nofer trunnions. Solutions are checked by Zahn Vis-cosimetry techniques. Exhaust orifices receive standard Blevinometric tests. There is no known Orth Effect.

TECHNICAL FEATURES
• Panandermic semi-boloid stator slots
• Panel meter covers treated with Shure Stat
• Manestically spaced grouting brushes
• Prefabulated Amulite baseplate
• Pentametric fan​

A few unfamiliar words there I bet. But could you pronounce them correctly?

 

[psionl0]

You wonder what they could possibly be doing 7 hours a day.

They are filling out reams of paperwork for their bureaucratic overlords and don't have enough time left for teaching.

 

[bruto]

When I started first grade in Detroit in 1953, it was "whole word" and flash cards or big illustrated Dick and Jane flip books. I was totally at sea and did not learn to read until the Christmas break, when my parents were surprised that I couldn't. So they explained phonics. Since I knew the alphabet and was not stupid, it clicked immediately, and by the time the break was over, they were using the front page of the New York Times for practice. The rest of the class struggled on, some reading badly, some not at all, and for some years after, most of my fellow students were poor readers and, though facile speakers, could not write a coherent sentence, because it never really occurred to them that reading and writing were in the same language, with the same rules, with which they spoke.

Reading instruction is a disaster in many places. Many kids think of it as a foreign language. In that first grade, the effort of teaching a room full of kids to read at first grade level was so all-consuming that during the entire year there was not time (and I mean this entirely literally) to teach any arithmetic at all, even to count! The first grade was numberless, except for a futile attempt to teach us to read a clock, which was equally disastrous for some at least. The clock in question had one long thin hand and one short fat one. Which one is the "big" hand? To me the short fat one was bigger. It obviously had more real estate. Another one my parents had to pick up. All they had to say was "long" and "short," but apparently the pure doctrine by which the teachers were guided was convinced, probably some condensation of the errors of Dr. Gesell, that children think taller is bigger until they're past seven.

I wonder if an earlier reference to blaming the Kiwis for this relates to Sylvia Ashton-Warner. She got half of it right, I think. A teacher in New Zealand, she found her largely Maori kids were not learning to read, and realized that they could not relate the material to their own lives, so initiated what she called the "key word" system, in which a kid was told to think of a word and learn it. No rule on what word, kid's choice, and one word at a time. They came up with words that were relevant to what they needed to say, and learned to read and write because, instead of "Janet and John," NZ's analogue of Dick and Jane, they were using language to read and write about what concerned them.

It was "whole word" learning, but worked in this context because the words were important enough, and the curriculum tailored to the kids. (e.t.a. and they were motivated to learn the connective and peripheral words in order to use the key words) It would not surprise me if people reading Ashton-Warner's books took the whole word part and threw the rest away.

Experienced readers, of course, learn to recognize and skim whole words and to use context, and rarely have to resort to phonics after a while, but looking at a whole word as a picture whose characters make no other sense is a very clumsy way to learn to read - slow and inefficient for many, impossible for some. If you are first learning to read, and if the material you're reading is entirely alien to your life, context is hard to find.

 

[Delvo]

In short, although nearly all* writing systems began as something more like Chinese (one drawing for one word or idea), everybody everywhere outside China who has been exposed to a more phonetic system has switched over to that instead. Some China-adjacent countries just have a bit of Chineseness leaking into them because China's there, and China itself just sticks with it for written communication between speakers of different languages/dialects within China, and because they hadn't invented or imported something better yet before sudden exposure to the Occident made Chinese writing a big part of what distinguished them from the Occident and thus became a big part of their "we're not them" identity.

And soon after posting that, just by coincidence, I ran across some new-to-me information from somebody more familiar with China than me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fL_S9GAVzE

China has apparently decided several times that its writing was a problem that needed to be fixed, because it's so cumbersome that it's kept Chinese literacy down. (And that was before computers became so prominent and Chinese people who wanted to interact with computers had to learn foreign phonetic systems just for that anyway.) Some of the reforms that have been proposed have passed and some have not. Some simplifications of the traditional system without touching the fundamental way it works have actually been done. A couple of phonetic systems have also been developed internally in China, and they do actually use one now, but it seems to have been relegated to sounding out foreign names & imported words, not replacing the whole-word system as originally intended. Adopting the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet has also been proposed and debated but rejected so far. (The fact that Chinese people with phones or computers use Roman letters on them, even as the input method to create Chinese characters on them if & when they do create Chinese characters on them at all, would indicate that literacy in the Roman alphabet is as high among Chinese people as literacy in Chinese characters is, or higher, but that does not mean the government wants to adopt it officially; that would be too much like admitting that something non-Chinese is better than its Chinese counterpart.)

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

No rule on what word, kid's choice, and one word at a time. They came up with words that were relevant to what they needed to say, and learned to read and write because, instead of "Janet and John," NZ's analogue of Dick and Jane, they were using language to read and write about what concerned them.

This may fit into a general idea that kids will learn what interests them.

Our 12 year old learned to read by looking at rusty old trucks. All he wanted to see was rusty old trucks. Flatbeds, box trucks, fire trucks, bread trucks, tool trucks, boom trucks, etc.

So he learned to read "1947 International Harvester" instead of "see spot run".

He read technical manuals - parts diagrams, hydraulic systems, drive trains, etc. So now he runs our 24x50 fully equipped shop. He's worth over $30k from the assets he has amassed. All I had at his age was a bicycle.

About a month ago he dropped an engine into his mom's dead subaru after the engine blew. It's worth about $15k now, and proves this idea of children costing so much is when you don't teach them any valuable skills.

 

[dudalb]

They keep on trying to find a "better way" of teaching reading then phonics, and keep on failing.

 

[dudalb]

I've long said that the United States isn't one country divided into states for administrative purposes like Australia is, it's fifty more-or-less independent nations that have all agreed to work together in certain limited ways.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

ANybody familiar with US History knows that.

 

[Lithrael]

In my experience the worst thing about it is the way it frames phonics as a last resort if you can’t figure out the word any other way. Kids are both, on principle, discouraged from sounding out words, and by accident, made to feel stupid if they resort to phonics.

 

[theprestige]

So bizarre to me. It's a phonetic alphabet. The relationship between the written and spoken language is very tight. Phonetics are the gateway to reading and writing the language.

 

[lomiller]

So bizarre to me. It's a phonetic alphabet. The relationship between the written and spoken language is very tight. Phonetics are the gateway to reading and writing the language.

The alphabet may be, but the English language isn't particularly phonetic. The pronunciation of only about half the words in the English language make sense phonetically. The rest either need to be recognized on sight or decoded using other means or other, non-phonetic rules.

from the WSJ article linked on the first page:

Very briefly, to illustrate how the English spelling system encodes meaning, consider the morphological families associated with the bases <act> and <go> in the figure below. The key point to note is that the spellings of the bases are consistent across all members of the morphological families despite pronunciation shifts (e.g., acting vs. action; do vs. does; go vs. gone). Similarly, note the consistent spelling of the <-ed> suffix in <jumped>, <ed> and <painted> despite the fact that <-ed> is associated with the pronunciations /t/, /d/ and /əd/, respectively. The spellings of <does> and <gone> make sense once you understand that spellings also encode the meaning.

Note how you really only need to recognize act, do and go, either by sight or phonetically. After that what you need to do is understand how the word is morphed based on meaning and these rules can remain consistent even as pronunciation drifts away from what makes sense phonetically.

 

[lomiller]

In my experience the worst thing about it is the way it frames phonics as a last resort if you can’t figure out the word any other way.

While it may be the first skill kids need when they learn to read, phonics really is the last skill you need once you learn to read. Being a proficient reader ultimarly requires kids to use phonics as a last resort, so it makes sense to teach them it's a last resort.

It's entirely plausible that the initial success of whole language in a remedial reading context is because it was being used with children who had stalled out at the stage of sounding everything out phonically and never moving on to other techniques. Conversely, teaching phonics to children who have learned other techniques but struggle because they can fall back on sounding out words should also be successful.

IMO Viewing either as a silver bullet for teaching kids how to read is probably not going to work. Kids need to lean all the above. This means teaching phonics, word recognition by sight, word recognition by context, word recognition by similar morphology, etc.

 

[Sherkeu]

English is a language with a lot of borrowed words.
Webster (dictionary guy) wanted to simplify changes to easier spelling but it didnt happen. People are stubborn to keep what they know.

The ancient origins of letters were based on the letter shape representing a word starting with that sound- but in one language family. Then others adopted, changed sounds for their word, deleted.some, added new.ones, combined.them.

After a few thousand years of sharing, trade or war or merger.
.....here we are. Id blame zee Germans, but my father's language of Fryslan
(Frisian) is closest in the English language tree.
And the French!!! Blame them too.

 

[lomiller]

English is a language with a lot of borrowed words.
Webster (dictionary guy) wanted to simplify changes to easier spelling but it didnt happen. People are stubborn to keep what they know.

The ancient origins of letters were based on the letter shape representing a word starting with that sound- but in one language family. Then others adopted, changed sounds for their word, deleted.some, added new.ones, combined.them.

After a few thousand years of sharing, trade or war or merger.
.....here we are. Id blame zee Germans, but my father's language of Fryslan
(Frisian) is closest in the English language tree.
And the French!!! Blame them too.

Who can we blame for forgetting the real name for bear?

 

[Blue Mountain]

English is a language with a lot of borrowed words.
Webster (dictionary guy) wanted to simplify changes to easier spelling but it didn't happen. People are stubborn to keep what they know.

Yeah, Americans are still using cheque, honour, and metre.

I personally dislike check instead of cheque because check by itself is a word. Is "Check name" an instruction to ensure a name is accurate, or the name one should put on a cheque?

Meter is the same. The whole rest of the world spells it metre, but, no, the Americans have to go and use a word that already means something else—an instrument for measuring something.

 

[bruto]

While it may be the first skill kids need when they learn to read, phonics really is the last skill you need once you learn to read. Being a proficient reader ultimarly requires kids to use phonics as a last resort, so it makes sense to teach them it's a last resort.

It's entirely plausible that the initial success of whole language in a remedial reading context is because it was being used with children who had stalled out at the stage of sounding everything out phonically and never moving on to other techniques. Conversely, teaching phonics to children who have learned other techniques but struggle because they can fall back on sounding out words should also be successful.

IMO Viewing either as a silver bullet for teaching kids how to read is probably not going to work. Kids need to lean all the above. This means teaching phonics, word recognition by sight, word recognition by context, word recognition by similar morphology, etc.

While I agree more or less, I disagree with the initial statement. You need not teach kids that phonics is a "last resort." It's generally a natural process. What you start with is not dependent on what you end up with. Many skills are first acquired in a way that will be left behind later. I think it a mistake to teach any skill backwards, as if it had already been acquired. The familiarity and mental shortcuts experienced readers use require experience.

An experienced skier does not do snowplow turns, but a ski instructor who expects beginners to schuss down the hill without them is going to fail more often than he succeeds.

 

[lomiller]

While I agree more or less, I disagree with the initial statement. You need not teach kids that phonics is a "last resort." It's generally a natural process. What you start with is not dependent on what you end up with. Many skills are first acquired in a way that will be left behind later. I think it a mistake to teach any skill backwards, as if it had already been acquired. The familiarity and mental shortcuts experienced readers use require experience.

Why do you think it's natural? Learning to read isn't like learning to talk, our brains don't come pre-wired for it.

An experienced skier does not do snowplow turns, but a ski instructor who expects beginners to schuss down the hill without them is going to fail more often than he succeeds.

I'm not really a skier, but I can't imagine people stop using snowplow turns until they learn something to replace them.

 

[theprestige]

Why do you think it's natural? Learning to read isn't like learning to talk, our brains don't come pre-wired for it.

Or do they?

Our brains may not have "come pre-wired for it", but it turns out that pretty much any neurotypical human can be taught to read to at least a first-grade level - the vast majority much further.

Meanwhile, no other species can be taught even that much (though one or two can be brought kind of close).

If that doesn't indicate some sort of pre-wiring, then what is it? Lack of public schooling for crows and marmots?

 

[theprestige]

Why do you think it's natural? Learning to read isn't like learning to talk, our brains don't come pre-wired for it.



I'm not really a skier, but I can't imagine people stop using snowplow turns until they learn something to replace them.

"Experienced skiers don't snowplow, so the best way for you to learn to ski is to not snowplow until you figure it out!"

 

[lomiller]

Or do they?

Our brains may not have "come pre-wired for it", but it turns out that pretty much any neurotypical human can be taught to read to at least a first-grade level - the vast majority much further.

They can learn, if they are taught. This doesn't mean they can figure it out on their own just by watching someone else do it.

If you expect students to replace phonics with other skills, it makes sense that you'll get better results if you actually teach those other skills instead of just expecting them to figure it out on their own.

 

[bruto]

Why do you think it's natural? Learning to read isn't like learning to talk, our brains don't come pre-wired for it.



I'm not really a skier, but I can't imagine people stop using snowplow turns until they learn something to replace them.

I probably put it badly. What I meant was that the progression from phonic decoding of words to recognizing them whole is pretty natural and that does not mean you shouldn't start with phonics or that you should start out as regarding it as a last resort.

 

[Susheel]

So bizarre to me. It's a phonetic alphabet. The relationship between the written and spoken language is very tight. Phonetics are the gateway to reading and writing the language.

The alphabet may be phonetic an d the alphabet is used phonetically in various languages, however not in English.

 

[ahhell]

The alphabet may be phonetic an d the alphabet is used phonetically in various languages, however not in English.

The words that 5 and 6 year olds use and learn to read are almost entirely phonetic.

I wonder, there does seem to some resistance to the notion that when teaching kids you start simple and then get more complicated as they build their skills. I see it in the reading debate and in things like history. Its curious.

 

[theprestige]

The alphabet may be phonetic an d the alphabet is used phonetically in various languages, however not in English.

The entire sentence you typed is phonetic. The only sticking point is the "ph" dipthong. And you know what? Schoolchildren are taught the phonetic dipthongs along with the rest of their letters.

 

[bruto]

The entire sentence you typed is phonetic. The only sticking point is the "ph" dipthong. And you know what? Schoolchildren are taught the phonetic dipthongs along with the rest of their letters.

true enough, and even if there are phonetic failures in English, enough of most words is phonetic that they can be extrapolated. Phonetic learning is not just about what a word must be but what it cannot be. You may have to guess how "would" is pronounced but you can know it's not a towtruck.

 

[Blue Mountain]

I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to read. I was extremely fortunate that my entire family—mother, father, grandparents, and two older siblings—read books, newspapers, and magazines all the time. It seems to me it was just something I picked up as I went along. I suspect what happened was I saw everyone else reading and asked how it was done, and they showed me.

 

[Susheel]

The entire sentence you typed is phonetic. The only sticking point is the "ph" dipthong. And you know what? Schoolchildren are taught the phonetic dipthongs along with the rest of their letters.

Maybe you need to brush up on what phonetic means. For example, the letter e has atleast three different sounds in the sentence I used the letter I represents two, as does the letter a... I could go on.

 

[novaphile]

I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to read. I was extremely fortunate that my entire family—mother, father, grandparents, and two older siblings—read books, newspapers, and magazines all the time. It seems to me it was just something I picked up as I went along. I suspect what happened was I saw everyone else reading and asked how it was done, and they showed me.

That is a very likely scenario.

I have many, very fond memories, of my brother reading to me.
(He's four years older than me).

We still have some running jokes about the way he would 'be silly' when reading some stories... e.g. "Thhhhhhsmall thhhilver bear thhhhhhlid thhhhhlowly down the thhhhhining moonbeam."

(Imagine the 'thhh' as a spittle soaked raspberry sound.)

 

[bruto]

Maybe you need to brush up on what phonetic means. For example, the letter e has atleast three different sounds in the sentence I used the letter I represents two, as does the letter a... I could go on.

True of the vowels, except a couple which have hard and soft forms, but if you can figure out the majority of a familiar word it is usually possible to figure out the rest.

 

[bruto]

[Oops, double post, stupid tablet, blame it!

 

[Lithrael]

While it may be the first skill kids need when they learn to read, phonics really is the last skill you need once you learn to read. Being a proficient reader ultimarly requires kids to use phonics as a last resort, so it makes sense to teach them it's a last resort.

Eeehhhh, there’s a lot of psychology in teaching too; a lot of kids react very badly to being presented right up front with the idea that the thing they are trying to learn and be proud of learning at the moment is just going to be deprecated later. You wouldn’t want to tell a small child who is learning to count or add on their fingers to try doing it without their hands until they had a pretty good handle on the concept of numbers, right? I mean you can but a kid with low confidence who isn’t good at it is just going to be discouraged. So maybe try it, but if they aren’t engaged with the challenge, let them get comfortable with numbers on their fingers, right? And don’t keep pointing at the kids who don’t count on their fingers saying “why don’t you try to be more like billy?” At least not until they clearly can count and add reliably on their fingers and it’s time to move on.

It's entirely plausible that the initial success of whole language in a remedial reading context is because it was being used with children who had stalled out at the stage of sounding everything out phonically and never moving on to other techniques.

Yeah, in that specific context it makes sense. Generally agreed with the rest of your post.

 

[Brainster]

I confess I'm a little amused at the complaint that phonics only works for about 50% of the language. For what percentage of the language does guessing based on the first letter or two and context work? I'm guessing quite a bit lower.

Phonics actually helps me remember how to spell some words that are not phonetic. Tucson, because when I write it I mentally pronounce it 'Tuck-son'. Phoenix is 'Fo-Enix'.

 

[arthwollipot]

Spoilered for length:

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.

Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation--think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough:
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

- Gerard Nolst Trenité

 

[jeremyp]

Re chemists, probably.

I was once looking at a molecule diagram on screen, and a friend (who ended up with a PhD in chemistry) looked over my shoulder and named the substance.

When I asked her how she recognised the molecule, she explained how chemical names often are just descriptions of the molecule.



If you understand the code, the names become things like: two hydrogens stuck on a carbon ring...

Many elephants pass by public houses.

 

[novaphile]

Many elephants pass by public houses.

(I had to look it up and it took a while...)

Weirdly enough I still have the first 20 elements memorised, purely because someone recited them to me as: H HeLi BeBCNOF NeNa MgAl SiPS ClArKCa

(aitch heli Bebcnoff, Nina muggal sips Clarkca)

Mnemonics work surprisingly well and seem to be very persistent.

Oh be a fine girl and kiss me...

Every good boy deserves fun...

And those are just the two that are in the front of my mind at the moment.

 

[bruto]

I don't know enough chemistry to get the many elephants mnemonic, I guess.

I only remember a couple. There's one for taxonomy: King Philip came over from Germany soused.

And I have forgotten the end the pi one: Now I sing a silly roundelay of radial roots...

I remember many years ago when we got social security cards my sister came up with a mnemonic. I found the mnemonic harder to remember than the number.

 

[arthwollipot]

I've said this before. Lots of people have mnemonics to remember the order of the planets in the solar system.

Mine is "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto."

The last is still part of it because I learned it when Pluto was still a planet.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

(I had to look it up and it took a while...)

Weirdly enough I still have the first 20 elements memorised, purely because someone recited them to me as: H HeLi BeBCNOF NeNa MgAl SiPS ClArKCa

(aitch heli Bebcnoff, Nina muggal sips Clarkca)

Mnemonics work surprisingly well and seem to be very persistent.

Oh be a fine girl and kiss me...

Every good boy deserves fun...

And those are just the two that are in the front of my mind at the moment.

When the 'mites go up, the 'tites come down.
Goddesses have double D's.

 

[bruto]

When the 'mites go up, the 'tites come down.
Goddesses have double D's.

I remember my sixth grade teacher came up with that first one, although a bit inaccurate on what mites are, she suggested "just remember what happens when you have ants in your pants."

 

[jeremyp]

I don't know enough chemistry to get the many elephants mnemonic, I guess.

meth - 1 carbon, eth 2 - carbons, prop - 3 carbons, but - 4, pent - 5, hex - 6

add -ane and you get carbon chain molecules: methane, ethane, propane, butane etc

Add -anol and you get the alcohols: methanol, ethanol, propanol etc.

There are other endings you can add to get different classes of organic compounds.

Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain. I found it easier to just remember ROY G BIV

 

[jeremyp]

I've said this before. Lots of people have mnemonics to remember the order of the planets in the solar system.

Mine is "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto."

The last is still part of it because I learned it when Pluto was still a planet.

There was a quiz night at my nephew's elementary school. One of the questions was "name all the planets". Naturally there was a bit of consternation, so the headmaster who was also acting as the question master (but didn't write the questions) said "we are looking for eight planets". Well that was fine except the answer he had written down (and the question master is always right) included Pluto but excluded Venus.