[tuukkah]

You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake! M + I makes "mi" not "emi", so M must be "m".] At least that's how children are taught in Finnish schools since sometime before the 1980s, and since then almost everyone learns to read during the first school semester. Also, one simple and efficient protection against dyslexia is to play the Graphogame (or similar) to get a lot of repetition with the sound-letter correspondences while learning to read (for various reasons, some brains take longer to build the necessary connections and you want to avoid the negative affects of learning slower than your peers if you can).

[gus_massa]

I agree. My older daughter was learning to read before school, and we started with the usual here in Argentina:

  ma, me, mi, mo, mu
  pa, pe, pi, po, pu
  sa, se, si, so, su
  ...

after a few more rows, we expected her to generalize because she is very smart, but it's harder than what we expected and we have to told her all the 21x5 cases. (The first cases were harder, and the lasts got easier.). I don't remember about the longer silabes like "pra", "bla", ... and there are weird words like "consternado" but I guess it was not obvious.

[tuukkah]

Yes, I think it will be somewhat random how many cases each child needs to be taught before they generalize. One thing I forgot to mention is that for polysyllabic words, they use a learning aid here: in the beginning, the syllable boundaries are marked with dashes in all text and in the second year, only in longer words. I don't know if it works in Spanish too, something like this: "A-yer ce-na-mos cons-ter-na-dos." Again, I think it's unnecessary for some children but helps others to keep learning while gaining more experience with the syllables.

[taeric]

I contest this. There is no correct "step from" in this. There is a post-hoc explanation for why a lot of things work. And there is some benefit in regularity. But most of this is, as stated, post hoc.

Consider, how do you read "f=ma", or "e=mc^2"? Why don't those follow the same rules? They use the same symbols as our alphabets, after all?

Or consider "do re mi" is pronounced differently from "do re me". And, amusingly, most people will not read those correctly. This doesn't rob the names of the notes as meaningless. Nor does it mean that they are not taught correctly. But you learn to interact with the symbols. Not merely transcribe them between representations.