I picked up the idea of reading at the same time my sister was learning to read. She is three years my senior, and she was reading by the time she went to first grade. Thus, at four years of age, I was reading.
I don't remember being completely unable to read. We had a wonderful encyclopaedia for children: it had three portions of text for each entry, targeted at different reading levels. I do remember how I was reading the first portion of the entries, and snippets of the next more challenging ones. Gradually I was reading only the third-level entries.
It was very interesting to go to Israel. I can, sort of, read the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, even though I don't understand the languages. But when I was confronted with the abugida, it was a wonderful feeling of being again in the position of not knowing how to read. There were those lines and blocks of symbols, but they just simply didn't speak to me.
I'm not sure how much I was actively taught to read. I know that my parents will have read aloud to me from "see spot run" level of books, and pointed out the words. Gradually I picked it up.
While ortography in Finnish is not a problem, syllablisation is. The Finnish words are long, and it is important to be able to be able to insert the hyphen and the line break at the appropriate spot -- at the syllable border. Having picked up the skill of reading in an unstructured fashion, I had sort of skipped over the syllablisation stage. The first several months of reading classes at school were painful: I was wanting to breeze along, but had to keep going back to the hyphenated texts to build up that skill.
(no subject)
I don't remember being completely unable to read. We had a wonderful encyclopaedia for children: it had three portions of text for each entry, targeted at different reading levels. I do remember how I was reading the first portion of the entries, and snippets of the next more challenging ones. Gradually I was reading only the third-level entries.
It was very interesting to go to Israel. I can, sort of, read the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, even though I don't understand the languages. But when I was confronted with the abugida, it was a wonderful feeling of being again in the position of not knowing how to read. There were those lines and blocks of symbols, but they just simply didn't speak to me.
I'm not sure how much I was actively taught to read. I know that my parents will have read aloud to me from "see spot run" level of books, and pointed out the words. Gradually I picked it up.
While ortography in Finnish is not a problem, syllablisation is. The Finnish words are long, and it is important to be able to be able to insert the hyphen and the line break at the appropriate spot -- at the syllable border. Having picked up the skill of reading in an unstructured fashion, I had sort of skipped over the syllablisation stage. The first several months of reading classes at school were painful: I was wanting to breeze along, but had to keep going back to the hyphenated texts to build up that skill.