How old were you when you learned to read?

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CosmicRuss
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14 Jul 2011, 5:01 pm

I remember all my pre-school books at home being English orthography and I was a reader before attending school [aged 4 years 8 months]. On joining school I was taught using the ITA method and we were told not to read 'normal' books.
It was very confusing and was abandoned by the local education authority soon after and left a few of my classmates needing educational support right through as far as secondary school.

I think I survived although I do not read at all as an adult, as a page of text just confuses me.



dougn
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14 Jul 2011, 8:43 pm

2, I think.



pensieve
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14 Jul 2011, 8:50 pm

5 or 6. Complete reading comprehension came to me when I was 23 or 24.


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2ukenkerl
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14 Jul 2011, 9:28 pm

Well, I figured out that I could read before I was 4, and my mother confirmed it. I was in a station at one point, and got a book just a bit over 4, and I could read the books and signs there. In school, I just remember how they taught the first grade to read, and I was the ONLY one in my WHOLE CLASS that read SENTENCES! You know how a fluent reader reads "like they are speaking" where a person learning to read may speak "worrrrd........byyy.......worrrd". There is just a distinct difference. We could all judge one another because we each had a turn at reading part of a story in a book aloud.



USMCnBNSFdude
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14 Jul 2011, 9:36 pm

I was 6.


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tenzinsmom
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14 Jul 2011, 10:27 pm

People would have thought Tenzin was reading at age 2 or 3 if they didn't know him. But he had memorized whole books--often after only one or two times hearing a book--couldn't read until 6.


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Callista
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15 Jul 2011, 12:18 am

Heh, my little sister did that too--whole books, reciting them as though she were reading. I think she must have believed it was a matter of memorization until around age three when she started to show that she knew different words meant different things, so Mom started teaching her to read. She learned by the time she was four.

I know I was reading fluently at four or five, but I'm pretty sure I was older than my little sister when I started learning. And, anyway, I didn't catch up comprehension-wise until I was about twelve.


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Taylor1002
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15 Jul 2011, 5:24 pm

I think I was 3.



casey15
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19 Jul 2011, 5:39 pm

almost 1



joeyfarlz
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19 Jul 2011, 6:42 pm

I was about 4 when I learned to read, and like my older sisters when it came to having readers in school, I was more advanced than the rest of the children my age, despite my dyslexia. I was reading books for year 5's and year 6's when I was in year 3, and roughly around that time, I remember having an avid interest in the classics, like the 39 steps, although my friends told me not to read it, because they were frightened of the story, I've no idea why, but I stopped reading it so as to not frighten them



Arisa
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19 Jul 2011, 6:44 pm

Three or four.



graywyvern
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19 Jul 2011, 6:49 pm

somehow i just picked it up by looking over my mother's shoulder as she read to my brother, who was just one year older; this was prior to school age. so it was awhile before i came to anything there that i didn't already know.
i started going to the branch library regularly. i got tired of kid's books pretty early because for me they ended too soon. so i started on the adult science fiction--at the beginning of the alphabet. by sometime in jr. high, i had read all of these. but after that i had found particular interests & i read more & more nonfiction & started going to the central library downtown. i'd come out with a huge stack of books i could barely manage, & by the time i got home i'd have read half of one.
i remember the year they introduced a sort of color-coded ranked reading system where you read a text & then answered questions about it. i went through the whole thing in a single day. this was the time when they figured i could read about 1200 words per minute (i wouldn't read anywhere near that today: i like the sounds of words too much).
the thing i regret most about adulthood is i have so little time anymore for that kind of voracious reading. now i just buy books i might like & it can take a couple of years before i get around to opening them. in college i would sit on the floor between the stacks & read a book in a few hours if i found one i liked. these days i still try to get into one big book every year (last summer it was War and Peace). i'm about 3 Pynchons behind...
i do love reading. funny how being good at it isn't something that society rewards in itself, only the credentials & certifications of being talked to for so many hours. i went to college with people who wouldn't read a book unless they knew they were going to be tested on it.
this was probably more than you wanted.


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earthmonkey
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22 Jul 2011, 10:00 pm

I started reading Disney baby books (stuff like one short sentence and an illustrative picture on each cardboard page: "The ball is red.") when I was about one, then by two I was reading some of the picture books with a couple sentences per page - one where Donald Duck or Goofy or someone was going on a fishing/camping trip, I remember the picture to one page and that's it.

By five, I could read short passages from Goosebumps chapter books, and read one on my own just before I turned six. After that, I don't remember, except I would read The Dancing Wu Li Masters when constipated at age eight. I started out thinking it was a sci-fi novel. When my high school chemistry teacher started to quote a passage to the class, I finished it from memory, which was interesting since I didn't remember anything else about the book. After that it's a big haze, but I do know that in 1st grade I had trouble with phonics and writing on the dotted lines.


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Oxybeles
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23 Jul 2011, 2:45 am

Somewhere between the ages of 3 and 4. I learned from a read-along program that my mother purchased for me (I think it was called Brite), where they would put various fairy tales and fables over the backdrop of a group of talking animals or something to spice it up for children. I was reading Dr. Seuss in first grade, The Hobbit in third grade, and by fifth grade I was the all-time leader in our school accelerated reader program, with something like 140 points when most other kids had 10-15 (you would need to read the book, and take a test on the book through a rudimentary computer program). Unfortunately, this led to my downfall in the public school system, as I was very interested in Physics, History, and Chemistry in my pre-teen/teen years. Through my obsession with reading every book in the school library (and a nice chunk of the science books at the public library), I quickly outdistanced all of the high school course material, and was left reading college-level texts on my own. Segue into me falling asleep from boredom in classes, into actively avoiding going to class at all. I skipped somewhere around 90 days of my sophomore year, a similar amount of my junior year, and only attended the last two weeks of my senior year (this was the first year of the implemented testing system, where you could pass a competency test and validate the entire course simply based upon your test score).

Ah, but I ramble on.



lostonearth35
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23 Jul 2011, 9:14 am

I don't really remember not being able to read. A friend of my parents once said I was reading books when I was under a year old but I think he was joking. :) Babies do sometimes take books and play with them as if they're reading them.



iSpeedy
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23 Jul 2011, 11:56 pm

I was 3. I loved reading street signs for some reason. 1st grade was so boring when they started teaching the class to read. I eneded up getting into a lot of trouble on account that I was bored, not to mention misunderstood by the teachers and kids.