What's the secret of reading English like a native speaker?

Question

How to read English for speed, fluency, and comprehension

Answer 1

THE SECRET OF READING ENGLISH

This is one of a series of questions on "Native English Skills". Native English Skills are those that native English speakers know automatically, but that English learners seldom or never do BECAUSE ENGLISH LEARNERS ARE NOT TAUGHT NATIVE ENGLISH SKILLS in standardized lessons. Most English-learning companies depend on the teachers to teach these skills. If your teacher is not a native-English speaker or has never thought about these skills, you will probably never learn them.

When you learned English in school, you were probably shown the character or word in your language, and the English word next to it. You just read the English word the way you read your native word.

Well, I have bad news for you: you didn't really learn English that way. YOU LEARNED ENGLISH BY TRANSLATING FROM YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. If you translate to and from your native language to read or listen to English, you will never be like a native English speaker.

Without Native English Skills, you will never sound like a native English speaker. And you want to sound like a native speaker, don't you? Isn't that why you are taking lessons in the first place? I love to teach Native English Skills, and you will love to learn them.

So here is the secret of reading English: English is a PHONETIC language. That means the sounds of the letters are directly related to the sound of the words. In other words, THE LETTERS SHOW YOU HOW TO SAY THE WORDS. In non-phonetic languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, you learn to read by memorizing the SHAPE, LENGTH, and STROKES of the character. Then you just naturally use these same ways to read English or any other phonetic language like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc. You do this because NO ONE HAS EVER TAUGHT YOU HOW TO READ A PHONETIC LANGUAGE.

FIRST, LEARN THE DIFFERENT SOUNDS OF THE LETTERS. Even if you are a beginner, you know the basic sounds of letters. In reality, letters can have more than one sound, depending on the word. And these sounds can be different, depending on if you are speaking American, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African English, etc. There is not just one kind of English. So you need to begin with LEARNING THE DIFFERENT SOUNDS OF LETTERS in the kind of English you want to speak. (I may be biased, but I think American English is the most useful around the world.) Obviously, if you have emigrated to Australia you would want to learn Australian English, or the version of English in the country where you live.

Next you need to learn how these sounds are used in different words - THE RULES OF PRONUNCIATION. English has many rules, which are often broken. You still need to start with knowing the rules so you can know when it's OK to break them. (This is true of any field of endeavor, by the way: art, music, writing literature, living in society, etc.) My favorite example of this is the letters "ough" and their sister "augh" can be pronounced SEVENTEEN DIFFERENT WAYS! Here are just a few of them: thought, though, through, drought, draught.

Next you need to know the rules of MAKING SYLLABLES. A syllable is one sound in a word. For example, "ball" has one sound or one syllable. "Baseball" has two (base-ball). And "syllable" has three (syl-la-bl).

Now that you know the different sounds of letters, the rules of pronunciation, and where to break the syllables, you can use the method called DECODING. In decoding you "sound out" each syllable to yourself just before you say a word. There is an international phonetic system of writing all the sounds in English, but it's a whole different alphabet. I like to do it like this: pro-nun-see-AY-shun, SI-la-blz, in-ter-NA-shun-ul, I invented this system because it shows you directly how to put the letters and sounds together to make words. You read the same letters you always read to learn how to say the words.

Once you learn these things, you will be able to READ WORDS CORRECTLY THAT YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN BEFORE. This is how I taught my son to read English. He could read a newspaper like an adult when he was three years old, pronouncing words and even names correctly, and sentences with proper intonation and phrasing.

What are intonation and phrasing? They are how we "pronounce sentences". Just as there are ways of pronouncing words to make their meaning clear, there are also ways of saying sentences. In fact, with different intonation and phrasing, you can change the meaning of a sentence! Intonation and phrasing are another Native English Skill.

But intonation and phrasing are another question. We answer that question here.

For now, let us learn how to use the secret of reading English together.