Three of my 1st and 2nd graders are ready to move to my evening classes. Here’s one of their spelling drills. They haven’t memorized these words; it’s all based on phonics. I’m not used to having so few students, and the video is a bit sluggish. I’m happy that I was able to [...]

This my reply to the second part of Mike’s email from this morning. He was asking if people could tell the tones of Chinese characters from their written form.

I assume Mandarin doesn’t have this issue (of not being able to tell how syllables are inflected) since each syllable has (one of 5?) inflections: hook, [...]

I hadn’t really had anything I felt like writing about for a couple of days, but then Mike sent me this email:

Obviously we don’t have accent marks in English. Is
this because we have more complex rules or is there no
way to tell exactly how a word is said based solely on
how it’s written?

Thanks, Mike. [...]

I finally have some video from my classes I can put up here, thanks to Patrick. Here is a clip from an oral spelling drill. This isn’t rote memorization. None of the words I ask the students to spell have been previously taught; they have to use phonics rules to figure out [...]

I’d been a bit worried that my Wednesday/Saturday class had deteriorated over the break for Spring Festival. It’s a pretty new class since it just opened in October. Also, quite a few kids in it were total beginners who didn’t even know the alphabet before starting. Since they can’t really practice spelling [...]

As many readers realize, the pronunciation of many English consonants change based upon whether or not the preceding consonant was voiced. For example, consider the word “cards”. The pronunciation of “z” and “s” is the same, except for the fact that “z” is voiced and “s” is unvoiced. The same can be said for “d” [...]