How did you learn to read, and at what age?

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me too! it still happens some times when i try to say a word out loud that i've never heard spoken. but then if nobody else knows the word either, i don't get corrected and keep saying it wronyg.

i had a classful of students laugh at me for mispronouncing a word once in grade 8, though i think they were just going along because the teacher was laughing (i doubt they could have said it either):

onomatopoeia as o-NOM-a-TOE-pee-a

@nostromo and @CockneyRebel: i learned to read with Archie comics. fun, but i think it had a horrible effect on how i saw men and women for my early years. tin-tin comics are cool though. what comics did you read CockneyRebel?

I knew how to read a few words at age 2 but really started at 3 years old. It seemed back then I was hyperlexic but now I have signs of both hyperlexia and dyslexia at the same time. If I am under stress I can barely read simple words and everything looks like a different language especially paragraphs. At other times I am able to read medical books and understand them and pronounce advanced medical terms with no problem. When I first started it was because of the Atari computer (I am now giving my ancient age away). I would sit on my dad's lap and play educational programs back then. My reading comprehension has always been lower than the ability to just simply pronounce the word.

According to my mother, I was reading before I was two. When I was two, I'd call letters while watching Wheel of Fortune. By the time I entered preschool, I was reading at a second grade level.

She didn't know how I learned to read. I have few memories of my early childhood and learning how to read is not one of them. I can only theorize that sometime before I was two, I found a flyer or magazine that looked interesting and browsed through it and I eventually read it.

I learned phonics just by watching Wheel of Fortune.

Learned to read at the age of 6 in 1st grade. I was extremely interested in reading and couldn't wait to learn it, but somehow I was convinced that reading is something that you learn in school.

My mother did try to teach me to read, because my interest was more than obvious, but she made the mistake to show me the letters in the connected version. Since I knew what the writing that I saw everyday looks like I refused to learn these letters because they weren't the "real" ones. Pity that I did so, and pity that she didn't understand why I refused her teaching. When I was finally in school I learned to read really fast, though.

I learned at 3. Now I teach literacy to adults. I have no idea of how I learned to read, so I try different methods on other people.

I personally taught my six-year-old, who has classic symptoms of autism, how to speak and read. He was speaking on the level of a 1.1 year old at age 3.4, but is now at least on grade level for reading and speech.

The likely problem: a phonics-based instructional approach at the school, which teaches kids to sound out words but does not address comprehension issues. Phonics is based on the premise that the student already possesses a good vocabulary, etc.

What I did:

1. I did not personally teach phonics at all--there are several good sets of phonics DVDs and videos available over the Internet, as well as good phonics software for kids. It is unnecessary for a live human being to teach autistic kids phonics.

2. I mainly did sight word reading accompanied by visual aids. (I have been told that the method that I used is similar to the "Your Baby Can Read" method and the method used to teach kids with Down's Syndrome to read. Sight word reading is an "old school" method for teaching reading, and I am old enough that it may have been used when I was in school.)

3. My son has a library of picture books. Be sure that picture books do not contain too many words per page and that the pictures closely tie to the text.

4. Buy several picture dictionaries.

5. My son has a huge video and DVD library. Whenever you play a DVD or video, turn on use the subtitle or closed captioned for the hearing impaired function. He mainly watches DVDs and videos--not regular TV. If regular TV is watched, it is always age appropriate and close captioned for the hearing impaired.

6. I also used read along DVDs--see Scholastics Storybook Treasury.

7. I used flashcards, flashcards, flashcards. Flashcards should have a label on the same side as each picture. If you use question/answer flashcards, they should have a picture and question words on each side. Flashcards can be used to nail down sentence patterns, question and answer patterns, vocabulary. I bought every flashcard in the teacher supply store and then started making them--at first using my own drawings, and then pics from books and magazines.

8. I bought Disney books to go along with all of my Disney videos (watched with closed captioning). The pictures in the books are great but there is generally more text than necessary and it's often poorly written. I purchased a couple of large boxes of mailing labels at an office supply store and put labels in all of the books, as well as simple text. If my son reads 2-3 Pinnochio books and watches the movie with close captioning, he actually comprehends the story.

9. Magic school bus videos also have books that go with them, and the same characters are in all of the books, which is nice.

Anyway, I've got to go. I have made many speech and reading products for my kids, but, unfortunately, nothing is commercially available at this time because they are keeping me too busy.

I learned to read at the age of two, and it was one of those Beka Books you see in homeschooling catalogs for pre-schoolers. My mom said I started reading chapter books (namely, The Bible) at the age of four that were meant for second or third graders, which creeped my Sunday School teachers out a little. I started reading medical text at the age of six (those little pamphlets about asthma and vaccinations), in which I bothered my mom about diptheria, whooping cough, and tetanus, as well as having discussions with my doctor about it. In fifth grade (when they suspected Asperger's) I was reading The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde as well as a myriad of dog books and a small book about puberty (I had nightmares about getting an innapropriate act done to me because of this), and I had a vocabulary that consisted of words like 'melancholy', 'fine motor skills', 'gross motor skills', 'right-brained', 'left-brained', 'extroverted', 'introverted', 'affable', 'malleable', 'cardiovascular', and things like that, as well as a tendency to argue with my teacher about certain things. Now, I'm a ninth grader who says words like necrotic, mellifluous, chandelstine, and other words that my classmates and peers find annoying.

Oh, and people learn to read at their own pace by their visual and auditory synapses. Some of the synapsical wiring may work slower, causing a delay in reading, writing, phonetical and morphological skills, and comprehension. Slow, poorly wired synapses may contribute to motor skill delay due to the impairment in certain visual and somatosensory synapses or mathematical difficulties, which is highly centered on visual-spatial skills, or that's at least my theory. Don't force your child to read when he or she isn't ready, though.

I don't know how old I was when I started reading, my mother thought I had memorized all our books and didn't realize that I really recognized the words. She was told I could read when I was in kindergarten.

I did not comprehend what I was reading until I was six (in first grade), and I remember how and when it occurred to me that there was a purpose to the words I was rambling off.

This is my son when he was a little over 2.5. I don't know when he started to read, it was a "one day we were looking at something and he read the word" kind of a thing. His speech was delayed too, I think he was only talking for a few months or so in this video. When we realized he could read, he recognized every word I had exposed him to since he was about 15 months (which was about when he showed us that he recognized letters).

I like the vision and dyslexia suggestions a lot. My mother was called an idiot most of her life and she's a very intelligent woman. She has dyslexia (and poor eyesight) so she does become fatigued trying to decode words. Math was even worse. Like you OP, I can't relate because reading came very easy to me.

I don't remember exactly when I learned to read. I don't really remember not being able to. A friend of my parents once said I could read when I was still a baby, but I think he was kidding.

Ditto.

Also from Sesame Street and commercials.

I want to make the point that a child can be smart but still have a serious learning disability. Functioning below grade level would be a big warning sign to me.

For eight years, I had daily seizures and was on meds that fried my working memory. (I was cured via surgery).

My six-year-old started decoding words at a young age, appeared "hyperlexic" but did poorly on his first reading comprehension test. He can learn, but it is a very, very slow process--difficulty retaining new material, communicating what he knows, recalling what happened at school, etc. (He has or has had most of the symptoms normally associated with LFA but not low intellect.)

I picked it up sometime in my toddler years, definitely by the age of four. I don't remember ever not knowing how to read. My mom just read to me, and I picked up the patterns. I also picked up speech patterns. Both my reading and speaking ability were behind my comprehension ability for a while, until I got the hang of getting meaning out of words. But reading really helped that; words on a page are much easier to process because auditory data can't be examined for as long as you like--visual data can be looked at for as long as you have the book in your hands. Soon after I learned to read I was making up my own sentences, and I learned the basics of back-and-forth conversations around age eight. My hyperlexia was no longer significant by age ten, or twelve at most, except when figuring out the motivations and unstated thoughts of fictional characters--something where I have only average ability now despite hitting the ceiling of every vocabulary test designed for the general population. (I don't think I'll hit the ceiling of the GRE, though; it'll be interesting to see just how many words I do know. I pick them up like pennies!)

The GRE was fun. There weren't any super-duper fancy words in it, but lots of nice high-level vocabulary. I think you'll enjoy taking it.

I didn't do absolutely awesome on it and I definitely didn't ceiling, but I got a 710 verbal ( graded on a scale of 200-800, in 10-point increments - translates to app. a 97.5%ile) and a 6 (perfect score) on the analytical writing section.

But I'm not as proud of that as I am of my math score. Words have always come easy for me but for years I thought I couldn't do math. I dropped out of high school and only got interested in math later when I read Isaac Asimov's book "On Numbers." It made math so fascinating to me that I started teaching it to myself.

I also didn't do any of the special studying for the GRE - just went in cold with what I remembered from teaching myself math and got a 750! (graded on a scale of 200-800, in 10-point increments - translates to app. an 82.5%ile.) Talk about a confidence boost!

I don't know how old I was when I learned to read. How to read seems obvious. I do know that it was before I started kindergarten. My mom told me that one day she noticed that I was reading.

I don't remember not knowing how to read, and don't have a good understanding of how other people do or don't learn how to read. When I was in elementary school I could read college-level books.

I have known words for long periods of time and pronounced them unusually when asked to read them aloud. I did and still do pronounce some words in ways that are uncommon. I tend to pronounce words exactly as they're spelled even after I hear others pronounce them. For example, I pronounce the word "vegetable" as a four-syllable word.

I dont remember how I learned to read. I guess my mom read to mw. I was probably about 3.

I learned to read sitting one on one with my Kindergarten teacher each day all year. I was lucky because I was the only student in the "class" so I was tutored basically. If I'd been in a regular school I think I might have had a very bad time of learning to read. I had phonics and learned from Dick and Jane books printed in the 1950s. Part of her technique was pattern, I think. Each day, at the same time, after snack time maybe(?), it was something pleasant, anyway - we'd sit together by the window with the room lights off, reading by the sunlight. She made it a very enjoyable experience. There was none of this ridiculous pedagogical rubbish where the teacher makes a clown of herself trying to engage students.

I am still a very slow reader and I do get frustrated so that I have many times given up on books, but I still love to read.