Anyone Can Read Now
With This Info!

The extent and seriousness of English functional illiteracy exceeds your worst NIGHTMARE,
but the very simple, proven solution is far easier than you would ever DARE TO DREAM!

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1. Definition of Functional Illiteracy
2. Extent of the Problem
3. Why We Do Not See the Extent of the Problem
4. Seriousness of the Problem
5. English Spelling Confuses Everyone
6. the Solution in a Nutshell
7. The Obvious Solution Never Tried
8. Characteristics of NuEnglish
9. Spelling Reform is the Only Proven, Easy Solution to English Illiteracy
10. Learn to Read Now!
11. All Reasonable Objections to Spelling Reform Have Been Debunked
12. Twelve Serious Linguistic Problems With English Spelling

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Amazon.com reviews
Celebrities Who Support Literacy
Home (in NuEnglish)
The Good News of John (in NuEnglish)
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10. Learn to Read Now!

Please sign the petition to educational and political authorities to SOLVE the problem of English functional illiteracy rather than continuing merely to FIGHT THE SYMPTOMS of our illogical, inconsistent spelling as they have been doing for over two centuries. See the third-from-last paragraph below.

Using NuEnglish, all but the most seriously mentally disabled will be able to learn to read in less than three months — perhaps much less — compared to just over half who presently learn to read, most of whom require at least two years to do so.

The educational history of practically every alphabetic language nation on earth — especially when compared to our own educational history — has proven that a perfectly phonemic spelling will greatly improve our literacy rate. This is because, unlike any other improvement we can make to our educational system — which would merely combat some symptoms of the illogical, inconsistent spelling — phonemic spelling will solve the root cause of the problem: it will change the spelling so that it is no longer inconsistent, illogical, and confusing. Although we may not learn as much as we should from history, we usually learn even less from educational history — especially that of language groups other than English. How many people would even think to compare our educational history with that of non-English-speaking nations? It is largely a matter of national pride.

It is the intention of Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnglish, Inc. to simplify the way everyone spells, but if you want to help a functional illiterate friend or family member NOW, you can do so by teaching them NuEnglish spelling.

NuEnglish Spelling Rules

The 14 vowels and 24 consonants (in underlined, italic capitals, for highlighting) have only ONE pronunciation. (No emphasis—capital, bold, italic, underline, or color—affects pronunciation in NuEnglish.)

  1. The A, E, I, O, and U are pronounced as in "That pet did not run."
  2. The AE, EE, IE, OE, and UE are pronounced as in "Mae Green tried roe glue." These vowels may, instead, be spelled with a macron (a straight line above a, e, i, o, or u).
  3. The AU, OI, OO, and OU are pronounced as in "Haul good oil out."
  4. The 18 single consonants are pronounced as in "YeS, VaL 'ZiP' KiM HiD ouR BiG FaN-JeT Win.
  5. Six consonant sounds are spelled with two letters: (1) CH is pronounced as in "chip." This is the only way the letter C is used in NuEnglish. (2 ) SH and (3) NG are pronounced as in "wishing," (4) ZH is pronounced as in muzhik. (Muzhik is an English word in which the zh is pronounced the same as the s in treasure.) (5) TH is pronounced as in "then," and (6) TT is pronounced the same as the th in "thin." This is because English spells the sounds in "thin" and "then" the same.
  6. The above letters represent the basic sounds used to distinguish between syllables or words. Two letters represent more than one basic sound. The X is used only for the KS blend. The Q (not QU) is used only for the KW blend. All the other sounds of X and Q are spelled out.
  7. Traditional English spelling does not distinguish between the vowel sounds in "sue" and "fuel." NuEnglish spells the vowel sound in "sue" as ue and the sound in "fuel" as yue. (This is equivalent to placing an F sound before the word "Yule").
  8. The initial sound in words like "which" are actually pronounced as HW. Air is expelled before the W sound, so it is spelled that way: hwich.
  9. There are no silent letters and no double letters having a single sound except OO and TT. (If macrons are not used, the EE is also used for a single sound.) The two Gs in the NuEnglish spelling "finggur" are in two syllables, therefore two sounds.
  10. All sounds are shown except the NG sound in NK and NX as in "bank" and "jinx."
  11. To show the accent, an asterisk is placed before the vowel in a primary accented syllable. An asterisk (say star when spelling aloud) is not used if primary accent is on the first syllable.
  12. Numbers are used instead of spelling out the number unless numbers are required. Numbers must be spelled out on some legal documents, such as on a check. Numbers should be spelled when numbers could be confused with letters such as L or O.

    Being able to read NuEnglish requires only knowledge of these 12 simple rules. In order to standardize spelling enough to enable programming of a traditional English spelling to NuEnglish converter and to ensure that everyone can read what you write requires knowledge of the following NuEnglish spelling rules.

  13. For consistency, the "-able" and "-ible" suffixes are always written "-ubul" in NuEnglish.
  14. All words, including names, trademarks, etc., are spelled as they sound. When proper names and trademarks are first used, for clarity and legality, the traditional spelling will appear between square brackets after the NuEnglish spelling, as in "Mattyue [Matthew] or Tilunaul [Tylenol]. The only exceptions are the names of the months and days and proper nouns used as common nouns, as in "Mok" ("Mach" number).
  15. Compound words (words composed of 2 or more words) are hyphenated, as in "hot-daug" and "finggur-print" ("hotdog" and "fingerprint"). A prefix is considered a separate word when its meaning is clear and the meaning of the rest of the compound word is clear also, such as "a-", "anti-", "dis-", "non-", "re-" and "un-" in "ā-mōrul", "antī-statik", "dis-u-pir", "non-profit", "rē-dū" and "un-butun" ("amoral", "antistatic", "disappear", "nonprofit", "redo" and "unbutton"). This special consideration for prefixes will improve sight understanding, and may not burden a word with more punctuation, as the hyphen may substitute for a star. Care must be taken with "re-": meaning "again", it is written with a long E and hyphen, as in "rē-dū" ("redo"), whereas with the meaning "back", it is written with a short E and hyphen, as in "re-mīnd" ("remind"). Chemical names hyphenate all prefixes, such as "polē-tetru-flōrō-ettilēn" ("polytetrafluoroethylene").
  16. Use an apostrophe to show contractions, as in "kan't" for "kan not", or possession, as in "Tom'z" ("Tom's").
  17. Clarification of spelling with numbers: The only deviation from phonemic spelling is for numbers of less than a million. Thus: "U 3-fōld inkrēs", "1 and 1 iz 2", "Sum-1 iz at thu dōr", and "Ī'l bē u-wā fōr 4 dāz". The reasons are because numerals are universally understood, are very compact, and are easily distinguished from "won", "to", "too", "for", "fore", and "ate". Ordinal numbers are written as a numeral plus "tt" or "ett": "4tt", "10tt", "100tt", "20ett", "30ett", excepting "1st", "2nd", and "3rd", and the pronunciation of "5tt" (fiftt). The use of numerals instead of spelling the numbers is optional and should not be used when filling out forms such as bank checks which specify spelling out the numbers, or whenever the number 1 could possibly be confused with the letters capital I or lower case L, or when the letter O could possibly be confused with zero.

The spelling rules to be taught first, of course, are spelling rules 1 through 12. Spelling rules 13 through 17 were added to make NuEnglish consistent enough to prepare a computer program for converting traditional English into NuEnglish and can be taught last. Begin by teaching only one student at a time. If you are an accomplished teacher you might be able to effectively teach five or six at a time.

A phoneme is the smallest sound in a language or dialect that is used to distinguish between syllables and words. Spelling rules 1 through 8 show the phonemes and the letter or two-letter combination used to spell each phoneme. The important thing to know is to teach the students four or five phoneme spellings every few days and do not progress to the next phonemes until they have mastered the ones already taught. Prepare simple flash cards and be sure they can respond with the correct phoneme almost immediately. Begin with the consonants. Review frequently until they know all the phoneme spellings. Say the phoneme and let them spell the phoneme (write the letter or two-letter combination). Emphasize that the names of the letters do not give the pronunciation of the phonemes. In fact, teaching children who have not learned the names of the letters is easier because they do not have the confusion of the names of the letters and the phonemes that those letters represent.

After the students learn the consonants and the vowels begin teaching them to blend the phonemes and their spelling. When saying the consonant phonemes, say them with an U phoneme (as in nut) after the consonant with as little emphasis on the U as possible (except for the letter X, pronounced UX). After the student learns to blend consonants and vowels, begin showing them simple three letter words with a consonant, a vowel, and an ending consonant. Then teach them the blending of consonants.

A simple memory aid for the NuEnglish spelling of the phonemes is the following:

Mae Green lied, "Joe Blue and Kevin 'top gun' Wood haul our oil." Qit mezhuring fish hwich yuez this ttin box.

(It is "Quit measuring," "which," "use," and "thin" in traditional spelling.) The first sentence has all fourteen English vowels in alphabetical order, long vowels first, short vowels next, and four other vowels last (this is the common designation of vowels, not phonetic terms). The first sentence also has three consonant blends, GR, BL, and ND. The second sentence has all consonant phonemes represented by digraphs (two letters) and the HW phoneme blend. The two sentences combined contain all of the consonants represented by a single letter.

You can use the Respeller found at http://nuenglish.org to prepare NuEnglish written material for your students to learn. Finally teach them to use the Respeller so that they can read anything they see in traditional spelling when it is respelled. Respeller now has a database of more than 600,000 English words and more are being added. Respeller will now convert more than 99.5% of any traditionally spelled English into NuEnglish. Anything not converted or not in the English database will be flagged for manual conversion, which you will occasionally have to do for the student.

Although people who cannot read English are at a disadvantage, if they can read NuEnglish, they are at a much smaller disadvantage because they can be taught to use the free Respeller at http://nuenglish.org. They can be taught to use a scanner and turn any printed material into a computer file. Then they can quickly transform up to 25 pages at a time of any traditionally spelled text on the computer into NuEnglish.

There is a short sample of NuEnglish written material in the page listed in the left-hand column of our blog at http://literacy-research.com. There is a longer sample of NuEnglish material in the Blogroll in the right-hand column of our blog — the entire Gospel of John, the fourth book in the New Testament of the Bible, which has 66 total books, or "love letters to mankind" from God. The Gospel of John is written in the form using ae, ee, ie, oe, and ue for the "long" vowels, because WordPress does not have the ability to use macrons (a long line over the vowel). Although the use of macrons makes the text shorter and just a little easier to read, the alternate form will be used for hand-writing because simply adding an E (the easiest of all letters to write) is easier than picking up your pen or pencil, making the macron, and then finding your place again. Most computers can be programmed easily to make macrons, of course.

There are also several free books available in the Kindle bookstore on Amazon.com. From the home page (http://www.amazon.com) click the down arrow in the "All Departments" Search box at the top and choose Kindle Bookstore. Then type Free Kindle Books in the box just to the right. Then click on "Free Kindle Books and how to Find Them," which will probably be the title of the first book that shows up. Then in the second box from the top in the right-hand column (which will be labeled "Try It Free") go to the bottom of that box and click on "Available on your PC." On the page that comes up, click on "Download." After it is downloaded double-click on the .exe file which is downloaded to install the program. There are several free Kindle books which can be turned into computer files using this computer program. Anything on the computer, of course, can be converted to NuEnglish using the Respeller.

After you have the free program installed go back to the page you found after clicking Kindle Bookstore and entering "Free Kindle Books" and choose your free books by clicking on the highlighted word "collections" under the first entry, "Free Book Collections."

The details of everything you need to know to justify — at long last — correcting our chaotic spelling and the grass roots program for doing so are carefully laid out in the book, Let's End Our Literacy Crisis, Revised Edition. The Amazon.com page http://www.amazon.com/dp/1589824970 has a good description of the book and our humanitarian program to end English functional illiteracy (see "More about the author" in the middle of the page), a review by Dr. Robert S. Laubach, president emeritus of Laubach Literacy International, and ten other reviewers, including some of Amazon.com's "Top 500 Reviewers."

Let's End Our Literacy Crisis, Revised Edition explains why the ideal solution to our very real literacy crisis is to simplify the spelling of all our words by spelling them phonemically — the ways almost every other alphabetic language in the world does! Although almost anyone can immediately come up with objections to doing so, every reasonable objection is thoroughly debunked by this book. These objections were also debunked by Thomas R. Lounsbury, LL.D, L.H.D., emeritus professor of English at Yale University in his book, English Spelling and Spelling Reform, published in 1909. (This book is available for free inspection at our company website http://nuenglish.com. Click "books" in the left-hand column. The last chapter of this book debunks the objections to spelling reform.) It was a very scholarly book that apparently was read mainly by his peers. The need for spelling reform was much less severe in 1909 (although there were many manual labor jobs in 1909, there are very few jobs available today that do not require literacy) and it had the further disadvantage of not proposing a specific spelling system.

Unlike Lounsbury's book, Let's End Our Literacy Crisis, Revised Edition does propose a specific spelling system, a scientifically designed spelling system named NuEnglish. Compared to every other spelling system proposed, to date, NuEnglish is provably the ultimate spelling system for the English language. Those who advocate traditional spelling or any proposed spelling system other than NuEnglish are challenged to carefully, honestly evaluate the information about NuEnglish characteristics on page "8. Characteristics of NuEnglish" (click in the sidebar).

If you teach someone to read NuEnglish (or get someone else to do it for you), that person will be even more vocal about the advantages of NuEnglish than most of the rest of us. If enough people push those in positions of authority (the Secretary of Education in your state or someone else with influence over the schools in your area) changes will begin to take place. Another way to speed up the conversion to NuEnglish is with a petition. If you post a comment (on the home page) with nothing more than your name, your city and state, that can be taken as a petition to those in authority to pay attention to our desire to at long last SOLVE our literacy crisis rather than merely fighting the SYMPTOMS of our ridiculous spelling system, as we have been doing for almost a century now. Absolutely nothing done in the last 80 or 90 years has made an overall statistically significant improvement in the number of students in the U.S. who become fluent readers! Politicians, education officials, and teachers may claim improvement by carefully choosing which data they use for comparison and by how long a time period the data covers. Anything that does not cover large amounts of data before and after about 1910 or 1920 and up to the present will not show the real literacy crisis characteristics.

The most effective action you can take to help end English functional illiteracy is to help publicize the proven solution presented on this website. No project — no matter how worthy — can succeed unless enough people know about it. Quite obviously, some people are much more influential that others. If you personally know a celebrity or a person of influence (celebrities are so busy and self-important that they usually will not respond to someone they do not know) — or if you know someone who personally knows a person of influence — please for the sake of hundreds of millions of English functional illiterates urge them to honestly examine the facts in this website. The following celebrities have publicly expressed an interest in education, literacy, or dyslexia:

Alex Trebek, Andre Agassi, Angelina Jolie, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ashley Judd, Bill Cosby, Brooke Shields, Carlos Santana, Charlize Theron, Cher, Christopher (Ludacris) Bridges, Deepak Chopra, Denzel Washington, Dolly Parton, Dr. Phil McGraw, Earvin (Magic) Johnson Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, Faith Hill, Garth Brooks, Gary Sinise, George Lucas, Geraldo Rivera, Goldie Hawn, Halle Berry, Itzhak Perlman, J.K. Rowling, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jay Leno, Jeff Bridges, Jeff Goldblum, Jessica Lange, Jimmy Buffet, John Travolta, Jon Bon Jovi, Jose Carreras, Julie Andrews, Justin Timberlake, Kate Winslet., Keanu Reeves, Kurt Russell, Lindsay Lohan, Lou Diamond Phillips, Maria Shriver, Matt Dillon, Michael J. Fox, Michael S. Dell, Mick Jagger, Mike Myers, Neil Diamond, Nolan Ryan, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Collins, Princess Beatrice, Rob Reiner, Rupert Murdoch, Samuel L. Jackson, Selena Williams, Sergey Brin, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise, Tom Green, Tom Hanks, Troy Aikman, Valerie Harper, Warren Buffet, Wayne Gretzky, Whoopi Goldberg, William H. Gates, William J. Clinton, Wynton Marsalis, Yao Ming, and Yo-Yo Ma,

For comments, go to the bottom of the home page.