Announcing our Alphabet Sounds Book
Alphabet books teach reading wrong.
They’re based on an outdated understanding of English and have barely changed in the last 500 years. So we wrote one that does it right, and we’ve made it available for free.
Here’s what makes ours different.
There are 44 sounds in the English language. Half of English sounds are written with more than one letter and alphabet books just ignore them. Can you imagine being a kid, trying to learn a language but only being taught half the sounds?
Kids need to be able to distinguish the sounds of a language before they can learn how to represent them with letters. But alphabet books focus on letters, not sounds.
Some letters make multiple sounds, and some sounds are written with multiple letters. A typical alphabet book begins something like this: “A is for apple, airplane, and acorn”, blissfully ignoring that those are three different sounds.
Alphabet books also completely ignore sounds written with multiple letters, like the two “th” sounds of English (the voiced “th” in “that” and the unvoiced “th” in “thin”) and most vowels!
Our book is organized by sounds, not by letters, which makes much more sense for pre-readers.
For letters that make lots of different sounds (“a” is pronounced differently in cat, can, cane, car, call, many, and father) we prioritize the letter’s most common default sound.
We include sounds like sh and ch, voiced th and unvoiced th, and vowel sounds like the oo in book and the oo in boom. For each sound, we include a variety of English spellings.
The ability to recognize the sounds of a language is called “phonemic awareness” and it’s a natural cognitive process that begins at a young age.
Not only does phonemic awareness affect your ability to read and speak, but it affects brain development in such a fundamental way that it determines your ability to even hear certain sounds as an adult. Consider the t sounds in “stop” and “top”. Those two sounds are different and would be different letters in Hindi, but you probably can’t even tell the difference.
To build phonemic awareness, we include a number of bonus pages to emphasize difference between commonly confused sounds
We hope these pages will be particularly helpful for non-native English speakers by highlighting sounds which are differentiated in English but not in other languages.
Instead of teaching kids “This is the letter A, and it can make 7 different sounds”, we should be starting with “Here are the different sounds of the English language” so that we can eventually move on to “these letters usually represent this sound.”
“Learning the sounds of the English language” is a different, and more fundamental skill than and a prerequisite to “learning the letters of the English language” and yet I’ve never seen a children’s book that focuses on that. So we decided to make one. And we decided to give it away for free.
Many parents asked us what they could do to support their kids who were still too young for our learn-to-read software. This book is our answer and it's available for free at mentava.com.
