always fun to see reading-teaching discourse bc my experience of learning to read was so far removed from any of the methods ive seen discussed.

to make a long story short, eyesight so bad you cant read a whiteboard (drastic understatement) plus sensory overload problems, auditory processing issues, and genuine misophonia means actual learning in a classroom was essentially just not a thing for me until much later, so the phonics tapes i had to sit through were wasted on me and in fact the overlapping sounds of almost thirty kindergarteners all repeating syllables and sounds slightly out of sync with each other drove my tiny self to the brink of madness and murderous rage. good thing i had already learned to read in a bizarre brute-force method or i wouldve been fucked.

my grand method that i had stumbled into a few years before, was extensively examining (at inches-from-my-face range) a cardboard thing my household had with the uppercase and lowercase letters on it, learning the shapes and which sets went together, getting the names of the letters from my mother, and then annoying whatever adult was around quite a lot by paging through a dictionary, squinting at it from way too close, and going "How do you say this word: L-E-T-T-E-R-S." within the year appended immediately by "No I don't need the meaning just say it." after i painstakingly gained enough words that most of the definitions and sample sentences more or less made sense, and the ones that didnt, i could exhaustively do dives on the words in a definition until i found an synonym that did make sense and work my way back up from there. i would usually check the pronunciation of a given word with a few different adults to bc of differences in their accents.

the effect of this is that for a long time (well into my teens) the natural state of my reading included almost every word read or written being prefaced with a quick internal recitation of its letters, and lacked the 'internal voice' apparently most people 'hear' when they read.

which might sound weird for some people i guess but the end result was fluid enough to get me through multiple books a day so. misophonia wins ig. i have checked out the historical stuff and do agree phonics is the way to go for vast majority of kids and cueing is a crutch that doesnt need to be taught as foundational bc of its flaws. but also bc if someone needs it they will come up with those & related strategies organically.