> in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
That's because the Russian alphabet is phonetic (in one direction). So you just need to learn the sounds corresponding to the letters and a handful of rules used to combine them. After that, you can sound out the words aloud, and then it's just a matter of practice.
English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced most frequently, and then take a subset of English consisting of words that follow those rules completely. (For example, the word "cat" is pronounced as a concatenation of the most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
>> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do
If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel, but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing so.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling <—> phonetic.
It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And silent letters or syllables.
But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually many words represented by each rule. And those words often have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
The Russian alphabet is not phonetic. а can be pronounced а, и, ы; е can be pronounced и, ё, э, and so on, and most consonants can be pronounced in two ways depending on the vowel that follows, or the presence of ь. You need to know where the tonic accent lies in every word to be able to pronounce it, because the position of a vowel w.r.t. the accent modifies its pronunciation. It is more phonetic than English or French, but less than Belorussian or Finnish or Spanish.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
1. recognize whether it's a compound word or a word with affixes, and if so break it down (e.g. shep-herd)
2. recognize the "origin" of the word - at a minimum, "native" (German/Norse) vs "foreign" (Greek/Latin/French mostly, though others come up) is usually obvious, though sometimes it becomes necessary to be more specific or even care about when it was borrowed.
3. recognize the stress pattern in the word, and how that will affect possible vowel sounds
4. recognize the letter pattern or sound pattern (depending on which you're starting with)
These are not independent recognitions; often one or two is enough to imply everything you'd need to know about the others (and this in fact reinforces the pattern recognition humans are so good at).
An informative example is "arch". "ar" fixes the pronunciation of the "a", and "r" is not ambiguous (ever, for rhotic accents; after syllable division for non-rhotic accents). The "ch" is pronounced "tsh" for most words (whether German or French), but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k". Usually such words are compounds with other visible Greek components.
> English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
Yeah, and you also learn the etymology of each word. With plenty of exceptions.
I learned English mostly as a written language, by reading books. And for _years_ after moving to the US, I had a problem with pronouncing words that I knew perfectly well how to spell.
E.g. I was confused when a doctor told me that I had "neumonia", even though I knew the word "pneumonia" perfectly well. Or that "gearbox" is not pronounced "jearbox".
> but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k"
Or Latin. I volunteer to teach English to refugees, so my rule of thumb: if a word is similar to a Russian/Ukrainian word then it's pronounced with a "k" sound. But there's also a bunch of French words where "ch" is pronounced as "sh".
But really, the main rule is to just memorize what the pronunciation is.
Now that you mention it, yes we did learn some combination sounds, and rules about when letters are hard, soft, or silent etc. And exceptions, such as "ph" sounding like "f" but those came later. The first books were like "Dick and Jane" with very simple words.
>English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
That seems to be one of the main components of Russian accent in ESL.
Not really? The accent source is typical for any pair of languages: different sets of sounds. E.g. Russian doesn't quite have sounds for "th", "w" ("William"), "a" (as in "apple"), etc.
What do you mean by "in one direction"?
In Russian, unstressed vowels are reduced so they are pronounced ambiguously. And when you try to write them down, you need to choose the correct letter for the full-length vowel. There are also double consonants that often are not pronounced differently.
On the other hand, if you just sound out the words syllable by syllable with full-length vowels, they will be completely understandable. You'll just sound a bit over-formal and/or robotic.
There were several attempts at spelling reforms, but only the first one (in 1917) stuck.
it would mean that each letter has one and only one sound, but multiple letters can share the same sound. or if it is the reverse direction for each sound you only have one letter, but multiple sounds can share the same letter. which one is true for russian i don't know.
i learned to read the cyrilic letters, but i didn't learn russian (i did try though) but with that knowledge i could read cyrilic texts aloud to someone who understands the language, assuming i learned all letters correctly and the first case is true.
in the second case i could write down anything i hear. much harder, but as a traveler that would actually be useful. be able to write down names and addresses i hear when asking someone for directions for example. i did learn to write (well, type) korean that way, but of course i had to ask a local to proofread what i wrote since i would not be able to spot mistakes.