In his 1933 book Language, the great Yale linguist Leonard Bloomfield recommended that young children learning to read English be presented with an extremely simplified alphabet in which each letter (grapheme) has just a single sound (phoneme). This simplified alphabet renders English as perfectly phonetic. That has important benefits.

• Children will initially learn that English is rational, that there are rules, an important life lesson.
• More than half of English words can be easily decoded and pronounced with this simplified alphabet.
• Children will see how to read (and write) many of the thousands of words already in their oral vocabulary.
• Critical neural connections between the visual (letters), the auditory (sounds), and the reasoning (meaning-sense-making), parts of the brain will be created that will last a lifetime.
• These connections will very quickly make reading subconscious and automatic, producing fluent readers at a very early age.
• This simplified alphabet can be used with children who are home-schooled years before they enter school.
• Children will also be exposed to many non-phonetic words. Their plastic brains will likely just absorb them, as "sight words."
• When they are in school they will be taught the additional rules that render English over 98% phonetic (silent-e, etc.)

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z