[hirvi74]

I wonder if other languages receive greater benefits from phonics than English?

English is wild language with plenty examples of phonetic rules being broken.

Take a simple word like 'rough'. Learning the phonetics doesn't help with the word 'cough'. Neither help with words like 'though' and 'through'.

Words like 'read' and 'lead' cannot be properly pronounced without context clues. Not to mention all the odd-ball words in English like 'colonel'.

I also think location plays a role too. Where I am from, words like 'tin' and 'ten' are not pronounced differently at all [1]. In other parts of the US, that is not the case.

I do not doubt phonics is the best method method for learning to read. All I am saying is that the other methods must truly be abysmal for phonics to be the best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...

[ch4s3]

Maybe? I'm not as familiar with reading pedagogy for other languages. However there are generally 5 components[1] and one is vocabulary which is how you distinguish Lead and Lead and Led.

You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.

[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/a-full-breakdown-of-the-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Gaulis...

[int_19h]

There's an amusing way to score how consistent the language orthography is: train an LLM on it, then measure the error rates for words it wasn't trained on. English is very bad on that metric: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/

"Phonics" the term is mostly something that comes up in American context because there is a controversy on how to teach reading and writing English to begin with. In many other countries, the equivalent of phonics is simply the standard methodology that has been in use for so long that most people can't think of anything else, so it doesn't need a special term to describe it.

[HDThoreaun]

undoubtedly. Reading languages with clear phonetic rules like spanish can be quite easily learned by speakers. You only have to remember 27 symbols and their sounds.