Sounds First

The problem

In the world, 781M people are classified illiterate. Sometimes the thershold is, they can't write their name.

These are big problems. Maybe we can fix it. The issue is in tiny (and to literate people, TOO obvious) details of letters and sounds, which are the bricks of the Great Wall of Ignorance. Let's talk about it.

Ask a reading teacher how th is pronounced. Either answer is wrong. Th is two sounds — [θ] in thin, [ð] in this — and since we lack the symbols, the categories, the teacher cannot write which and can hardly say, or teach, or know which. Modern dictionaries solve this with the International Phonetic Alphabet. Most teachers of reading have never learned it. So they teach “sounding it out” without knowing what the sounds are, as if there were one answer when there is a latticework of answers. It is not a small gap. It is making children climb a sand dune when a stone stairway is right there.

Children learn the alphabet song. They know it well; the names of the letters, and they can usually say a word's first consonant, maybe a vowel in the word, but then they guess the rest. That's typical among semi-literate Americans; the habit sets by third grade and lasts a lifetime. Look up the adult literacy figures for the United States; they are shameful. Do we want to hand India the same result? Please, no.

The stairway

Learning should build upon existing knowledge. A child is already a long-practised expert in the sounds of her own language. So start there: the known sounds in their mouths. Give one sound a mark, they want to know the rest. Give the rest, and now they can read anything written in those marks — that is literacy, at their feet, in weeks rather than years. After skill and confidence with []-bracketed phonetic writing, then, show how ordinary spelling is ambiguous. Reveal the ambiguity map not for memorization but to just know it is there. Then teach vocabulary as triples: meaning, spelling, and pronunciation joined together to make any word. Without the pronunciation, a person remains uncertain, what is that word. Offering sound-it-out condemns them to an eternal guessing game.

No. Learn the sound symbols, then learn the words as triples. That's all.

1. Students already learned their sounds; they know them.
2. Using []-brackets, teachers should teach sound-trustworthy letters, these easy labels for known (and some new) sounds, and practice phonetic literacy for information, confidence, and fun.
3. Afterwards, transition to text-in-the-wild, outside []-brackets. Learn meaning as always. For phonetic scripts, just learn the script, and continue as before. But for semi-phonetic scripts like English, French, or Thai, students will remain uncertain about pronunciation until they hear it, or see the truth written in []-brackets. Tom's Utterance of the Day web app (tomveatch.com/uotd) teaches 20+ languages with spelling AND []-bracketed pronunciations, so students know how to say everything.

   Without IPA support, students can still guess, even randomly from the ambiguity map of English spellings. Guessing is a fine placeholder, but sounding it out confirms nothing: guess, then guess again, forever. Hear it once. One heard example locks it in. This is the way.

In this order it is a staircase: easy steps that lock in progress. In any other order it is a dune of sand: one step forward, two steps back.

My part:

• Preparation: A 7-year PhD on "English Vowels"; I have measured the sound systems of English as closely as anyone alive.
• Invention: simpler but world-changing; a phonetic chart can be labelled with drawings of the mouth — where the tongue is, what the lips do — instead of Latin words and graduate school. A drawing has no English: everyone has two lips. With drawings, real phonetics is put in the hands of anyone who can see a picture, even those who cannot yet read a word. The charts print on one sheet, front and back.
• Vision: the world is simply a different place after phonetics becomes universally, easily, freely accessible instead of hidden in linguistics graduate schools. The social hierarchy of illiteracy dissolves when the impassable wall of illiteracy is discovered to have an easy path to climb over it. This is not my courage, it's that I can just see, the world is now different. Can you see it too?

Three doors, and what I am asking at each

1. Education officials, and the teachers you train. Give me access to teachers. One hour before and after lunch, with a phonetic alphabet and me, and a future teacher of reading knows what she is talking about. I will test them. A country whose teachers know IPA is an educationally accelerated country.
2. Food distribution. The chart is one sheet of paper. Put it in the bag with the subsidized grain — first as an experiment we can track, then everywhere. An illiterate adult needs paper, pen, explanation, and time to practice. The drawings are a curriculum, revealing each secret principle: the features of phonetics. For those with a smartphone, the QR code on the page links to audible teaching resources and drills.
3. Phone makers — Jio and the rest. The same lessons run as a web app on any phone, today, free. Preload it. Your customers who cannot read become customers who can; they buy your phone to do it.

What is proven, what is arguable, and what comes next

Proven: Demand is vast; need is desperate.

An illiterate person cannot read or follow directions, signs, instructions; cannot use a bank, a post office, email; can hardly participate in the modern economy. The illiterate is slave to the literate. Hence need is desperate.

A random, nicely-dressed taxi driver at the Indira Gandhi airport holds the instrument upside down, proving he never examined letters long enough to know right side up. 80% of street signs in Delhi are Latin letters; he cannot confirm his destination - or do his job! Hence demand is vast.

Arguable: this is the solution.

I can teach (and have done) an illiterate street cobbler to read [haha] in 90 seconds; he knew the sounds, he now recognizes the symbols, he sees that sequences in time or on paper correspond; he reads. Hence it is possible, and the rest is detail: 20+ features, 40+ symbols; get it in school, use my app, or teach each other.

In Waltham, Massachusetts, 170 years ago, 800 schoolchildren in 10 schools taught with a phonetic alphabet and readers only, before transitioning to common spelling and common readers, were reported to be fourth or fifth grade equivalent at the end of first grade.

It was dropped when the superintendent took another job, and uncomprehending traditionalists took over. They re-imposed on every child the confusion matrix of English spelling, which makes every word into a lattice of guessable options, and without even direct descriptions or unambiguous names for the options, before getting information, fun, or confidence from reading. No wonder it takes four more years, and many pathways, for people to climb that sand dune and finally absorb English literacy -- if ever they do.

This is the argument. They called phonetic knowledge a distraction; it is an accelerant.

Next: I want to teach the teachers, so they know the actual sounds and a way to write them. Recruiting IPA-competent teachers as researchers, we may prove IPA First leads to literacy, better, faster, more.

One last thing. Every illiterate person sees every unreadable sign as a stop sign. From outside we see poverty, dropout, caste limitations, malnutrition. From inside, all day, it is the same experience: this is not for you. Literacy may be the invisible variable under a vast proportion of human inequality. Even if it is a small fraction, this fix is affordable, possibly viral. Think about it.

Drawings on charts is my idea, but sounds and sound-based-writing belong to everyone, like the human mouth. My job is: To create an effective and viral instrument, app, curriculum. To travel creating Teacher-Educators for the IPA across the world. To seed the potentially viral spread. Then it is no longer my work, but yours, and the world's.

Tom Veatch
September 2026