A few years ago I started learning to use a complex 3D graphics application, but there wasn't a lot of written documentation.
There were, however, a lot of how-to videos on YouTube, but these are extremely tedious to watch. The authors usually spend 15 minutes telling you how to do something that should only take a minute or two, once you know the trick.
Nearly every person who makes an instructional video fills it with the same basic start-up information, their helpful hints, their pet peeves, their verbal tics and other time-wasting drivel completely unrelated to the task at hand.
And that's the problem with video: you can't effectively skim it or use text searches. So whenever I found a written tutorial I was relieved because I could skip right to the part that I needed to know. Instructional videos are such a huge waste of time.
Written tutorials are also easier to use. You can look at them side-by-side with what you're working on and proceed point-by-point without having to constantly stop and start the video, or back up the video, or try to understand the video author's accent.
But on more than one occasion I found comments about these excellent written tutorials saying, essentially, "I hate this! Make a video instead!"
Why? It baffled me that someone would actually
prefer a video. I had always supposed that people made videos because they were easier to crank out. Rather than thinking through what you want to say, doing screen caps, typing it all in, editing it and proofreading it, with a video you just sit there and yak (and yak and yak) while you demonstrate what you're trying to teach.
But today,
after seeing this story on an NPR website, I finally understand the real problem:
American kids can't read any more. Now, this was a radio program, so it was audio. I dreaded having to listen to the whole thing. Audio has all the same problems as video: you can't skim or search it. But I just wanted to find out actual reason for why kids these days can't read.
Fortunately for me, the script of the radio program was included, so I could skip to the important part. And the reason kids can't read today is that
reading teachers don't teach phonics. That is, they don't dwell on the fact that the letters of the English alphabet have a phonetic correspondence to the sounds you make when you speak.
In the last few decades most reading teachers have used a touchy-feely "whole language" approach, rather than what they considered the staid and rote phonetic method.
But writing systems, for most part, are phonetic. That is, they encode sounds as symbols, which you decode by pronouncing the sounds the symbols represent.
Not all writing systems work this way. Chinese and Japanese use pictograms or ideographs to represent words. Japanese actually has three writing systems: two are phonetic syllabaries (katakana and hiragana), and one is ideographic (kanji).
Proponents of whole language aren't completely off base. As readers of English become more adroit the phonetic component of writing becomes less important. They start to recognize entire words and the sounds never enter their minds. Reading in this sophisticated fashion allows people to read at hundreds of words per minute, and some people can read even faster than that.
At this point a written word becomes a concept, like a Chinese pictogram.
It is this realization, I believe, that convinced educators (incorrectly) back in the day that phonics were unnecessary, boring and detrimental. They thought they could let kids skip the tedious part of reading -- converting symbols to sounds -- and progress directly to the sophisticated method that the most adept readers use.
Contributing to the denigration of phonics is the fact that English doesn't have a truly phonetic writing system. It's a Germanic language that has been infiltrated by thousands of French, Latin and Greek words over a millennium.
Also, the pronunciations of native English words have changed drastically over the centuries, so that the spellings of many words have little to do with the current pronunciations: enough, through, friend, four, says, etc.
Foreign loan words from French, Latin and Greek have their own pronunciation rules, and even grammatical rules, such as for plurals: alumnus -- alumni, millennium -- millennia, crisis -- crises, and so on.
Other languages don't have this problem to the same degree as English. The vast majority of European languages (German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.), are much more phonetic than English. They use different -- though consistent -- sets of rules for pronunciation, which makes Americans think those languages aren't phonetic.
I have studied several other languages (German, Russian, French, Japanese) and the only way for me to grasp them was to learn the phonology of the languages and the intrinsic link to their writing systems (with Japanese, it's the kana, not the kanji).
I can read German, French and Russian with a fair degree of fluency, but I'm totally lost with Japanese. I didn't study it as long, and I didn't learn the kanji so I'm totally illiterate in the language. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of kanji, and there are no shortcuts for learning them. You have to memorize them all by rote. When I realized that, I gave up on Japanese: TLDR. (I've also forgotten most of the kana: there are more than 140.)
Memorizing kanji takes years and years. Worse, if you don't use them on a daily basis, you immediately start forgetting them. My wife's Japanese teacher had lived in the United States for decades and had forgotten the lesser-used kanji. A highly educated Japanese-born professor had devolved to a high-school level reading vocabulary.
The crazy thing is that
he still knows the words those kanji represent: he just can't read them or write the kanji anymore. He can still spell the words out with kana -- he'll just look illiterate if anyone else sees what he's written.
This is why the "whole language" approach for teaching kids to read has failed. Yes, advanced readers can instantly link a sequence of characters to a word without sounding out the letters. But only after seeing it over and over, the same way a Japanese person learns kanji.
There are thousands upon thousands of common English words: too many for kids to memorize. It's far easier to learn the 26 letters of the English alphabet and several dozen pronunciation rules, and several more dozen exceptions to those rules.
And phonics works. According to the APM story, after teachers in Bethlehem, PA received training in the science of reading (basically, phonics), the reading proficiency of their students doubled within two years.
Once kids learn the basic rules they can decode most any text. They may not know the exact meaning of every word right off the bat, but nine times out of ten they'll be able to get the gist of mystery words from context.
And unlike the characterization some whole language proponents have hit phonics with, it isn't just a rote method: it is a problem-solving technique. It teaches kids how to break down a problem (a written word) into its component parts (the letters) and come up with an answer (the pronunciation).
This isn't the first time this "reading war" has flared up. In the 1950s a teacher named
Rudolf Flesch found a 12-year-old boy who couldn't even sound out the word "kid." This prompted him to write the book
Why Johnny Can't Read.
The book
inspired Theodore Geisel to write
The Cat in the Hat, proving that books using the principles of phonics don't have to be boring.
