If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
But it worked for AI with BERT, so it will work for kids, right?!
/s
I know phonics has issues but at least it creates an internal framework to figure things out. No idea how this new system works, but phonics doesn’t preclude contextual reasoning and it’s tried and true for ages.
How do more symbolic writing languages work? Like Chinese characters where there’s just a huge variety of characters vs English’s Latin alphabet.
Chinese is a ton of memorization and figuring things out from context, mostly (source: am an adult learner, been learning for about a year now). I’d say it’s not directly comparable to learning spelling of any latin-alphabet based language (source: english is my second language, I had to learn it the hard way when I was old enough to remember the pain of it). But interestingly enough a lot of characters do have some clues in them, either for pronunciation, meaning, or both. You start to see the patterns after a while.
Basic example: 妈妈 (ma1ma - mother), 妈 character consists of 女 (nü3 - woman), and 马 (ma3 - horse). Woman part is related to the meaning, horse part is a pronunciation clue since it’s also a ma sound (albeit with a different tone).
But even with the clues you have to sit down and just memorize a ton of characters, which is not what the 3 clue system is doing.