Precisely because our local environment leans heavily syllabic, teaching pure, clipped, individual letter sounds is the critical bridge our students need to conquer English.
In a syllable-based language environment, students naturally look for vowel anchors. If we teach them that a consonant includes an additional vowel sound, we distort the actual building blocks of decoding.
A venomous snake once found a sleeping porcupine. It wrapped itself around the animal, feeling warmth, safety, perfection. Then the porcupine woke. Its quills rose instantly. The snake felt pain. But instead of letting go, it squeezed tighter. The tighter it held, the deeper the quills pressed. Still, it refused to release its grip. It believed holding on would somehow make things better. It didn’t. The pain only grew worse. In the end, the snake lost everything—not because of the porcupine, but because it refused to let go.
A common observation from Chinese primary teachers is striking: a substantial number of Grade 1 and 2 pupils can write characters correctly from dictation, yet they falter when asked to read or write accurately from Pinyin by itself. Accuracy with less familiar or novel syllables remains weak.
This pattern helps explain why some observers feel that today’s pupils handle pure Pinyin less confidently than cohorts a decade or more earlier. Several factors are at work.
This post is prompted by a recent discussion on LinkedIn between Sean McKenzie, an English teacher in Hangzhou who works with students from age 3 to adults of 60, and me. His observations reminded me of the Tamil fable about the prince who caught a rabbit with three legs and went around insisting that all rabbits have only three legs. Personal observation became “truth,” even though it was factually wrong.
In the same way, dismissing Pinyin as “for foreigners” ignores the reality of how it is taught and used in schools across China and beyond.
We often wonder why so many children—especially those diagnosed with dyslexia—struggle for years to acquire basic literacy. The common consensus blamed the child's brain, assuming they had a fundamental deficit in phonological processing.
But my decades of teaching experience, combined with an extraordinary case of a single bilingual child, proved a completely different reality: Children aren't failing to learn; they are shutting down because of how they are taught.
Specifically, they are shutting down because teachers around the world are unknowingly sabotaging them with extraneous sounds.
The Puzzle That Started It All
Every genuine breakthrough begins when someone dares to ask the questions others ignore.
When I began teaching my first student, I was struck by a puzzle: how could such an intelligent child fail to read in English after two full years of schooling? That simple question opened a path that has guided my work ever since.
My journey into literacy advocacy began not as a trained teacher, but as a curious observer. I wanted to understand why so many bright children struggled to read in English, even though they could read fluently in Malay and Pinyin. That question drove me to teach from 2004 to 2010, and through those years I discovered something crucial: the widely accepted explanation—that dyslexia is caused by a phonological awareness deficit—was simply not true. All of my students could read in other languages; their difficulty was specific to English.
The core issue isn't just phonics or romanisation—it's a deep cultural and political reluctance to admit that a system introduced decades ago might need refinement, especially when outsiders (or even internal reformers) point it out. China created Hanyu Pinyin in the 1950s by adapting Western systems like Yale romanization. It deliberately moved away from Bopomofo (Zhuyin) for mainland use because pure alphabetic initials (b, d, etc., without added vowel sounds) were cleaner and more consistent.
Why the Silence on Questions That Could Slash Illiteracy?
Purple Culture (purpleculture.net) positions itself as a go-to educational website for Chinese learners worldwide. It offers excellent free tools: Pinyin charts with audio, text-to-Pinyin converters, practice sheet generators, dictionaries, and resources for teachers and students. Headquartered with ties to Hong Kong and Beijing, it serves millions seeking accurate Mandarin mastery.
Flushing Out the Top Brains: U.S. and China’s Shared Tragedy
The U.S. has already shown us how to cripple its brightest children: teach letters with extraneous sounds. Logical kids hear buh for b, muh for m, and immediately detect the inconsistency. They shut down, not because they are “dyslexic,” but because the system itself is broken. The result? Curious, analytical children are flushed out of classrooms, mislabeled, and silenced.
Since 2004, I have been teaching children labelled "dyslexic" to read English by stripping away the "noise." I have seen time and again that when you remove extraneous sounds—like teaching 'b' as "buh"—the "dyslexia" often vanishes within weeks.
Now, we are seeing the exact same disaster unfold with Pinyin.
The Death of Clean Pinyin
The Star today reports a dual crisis for Chinese students in Malaysia: fewer candidates, fewer top scorers in the SPM. The shock is palpable. But let’s be blunt—this collapse didn’t come out of nowhere. It is the direct consequence of wrong teaching imported from China, and the silence of educators who refused to confront it.
The Bopomofo Infiltration
A Learner's Frustration with Pronunciation and Tones
As someone who's spent years navigating the world of dyslexia and education—teaching kids labeled as dyslexic and authoring insights on why so many struggle with reading—I've come to appreciate how crucial clear, accurate instruction is in any language learning journey. In my recent blog post, "Unlocking the Potential of China's Dyslexic Students (Part 1)," I delved into the literacy challenges in Chinese schools, where a persistent 20-25% of students disengage due to confusion from flawed teaching methods. There, I highlighted how mixing Pinyin with Bopomofo initial sounds creates unnecessary hurdles: "Curious intelligent kids in China are confused when they cannot blend pinyin finals with bopomofo initials." This mirrors a broader issue I've encountered in my own pursuit of Mandarin fluency—frustrations with podcasts aimed at learners that butcher tones and pronunciation, undermining the language's inherent beauty and clarity.
Around February 9, 2026, I came across a video by an English-speaking teacher based in Thailand. Her teaching style was engaging, so I subscribed to her channel to explore more content. However, I was disappointed to find a video on teaching Pinyin that promotes a non-standard approach.
In the video (available here: LINK), around the 4:10 mark, the teacher explains: "We use finals to make the letter clearer." She then demonstrates teaching Mandarin initials by pairing them with finals—similar to the traditional Bopomofo (Zhuyin) method—claiming that pronouncing the initials alone (as they might sound in English) is unclear, so they should always be taught with an added final for accuracy.
Here is a comment I made this morning, on a FB post by Dyslexia Inspired.
This resonates deeply with views I've been expressing since 2010. Back in 2004, when I began investigating why many intelligent children could fluently read in Malay and Pinyin (Hanyu Pinyin) but struggled with English, the prevailing explanation was a phonological awareness deficit as the root cause of dyslexia.
I wrote extensively on social media challenging that theory, arguing it couldn't hold because these same children demonstrated strong phonological skills in more consistent orthographies like Malay and Pinyin.
That dominant theory faced significant scrutiny and was largely reframed or debunked around 2017, with emerging research highlighting its limitations.
Now, it feels like the same old idea is being repackaged with new terminology—what I'd call putting fresh lipstick on the same pig.
For more on my early writings, Google search "phonological awareness luqman michel"
Here are comments on the post:
The dominant view, repeated endlessly in Western research, is that dyslexia is a neurobiological phonological processing deficit. But in 2010, I began questioning this after teaching children who struggled severely with English yet read fluently in transparent orthographies like Malay and Pinyin.
If a child truly has a phonological deficit, shouldn’t it impair reading in any alphabetic system? Yet these same children decoded Malay and Pinyin effortlessly.
Across the Western world, educators and researchers increasingly claim that children struggle to read because they lack phonemic awareness—the ability to identify, isolate, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. This idea has become the cornerstone of reading interventions, teacher training, and curriculum design. But what if the problem isn’t in the child’s brain at all?
The Fatal Blind Spot in Phonics
The Giant Hole Nobody Talks About
Greg, like almost every phonics advocate in the English‑speaking world, believes the main problem is that teachers are not being explicit enough.
I argue the opposite: teachers are being explicit about the wrong sounds.
Pinyin vs. the Phonics Plague
In Part 1, I asked whether my emails to SCMP, Liberty Times, and Global Times—plus blog posts dismantling dyslexia dogma—nudged Beijing’s October 25 crackdown. Now let’s dig deeper.
This isn’t about “misinformation.” It’s about shielding myths—especially those exposed by Pinyin’s quiet brilliance.
My Disappointment with SCMP
As I sit here reflecting on World News Day – that global rallying cry for fact-based journalism led by over 900 newsrooms worldwide – I can't shake a profound sense of irony. The South China Morning Post (SCMP), one of Hong Kong's flagship outlets and a proud participant in this initiative, published a stirring message from Editor-in-Chief Tammy Tam. Titled something along the lines of "Acknowledging their role as watchdog, newsrooms must rise to the challenge by embracing new technology while maintaining integrity," it was a heartfelt ode to the "search for the truth." Tam's words rang true: Journalists must "substantiate facts, use dependable sources, seek diverse perspectives and provide context." In an age of rampant misinformation and AI-driven doubts, she emphasized the media's duty to act as a "watchdog with social responsibility, "fostering informed communities through credible stories. She even called out Big Tech for exploiting journalistic content without consent or compensation, urging ethical AI adoption and partnerships that enhance reliability. It's a vision of journalism as a beacon in our "complex, uncertain and fast-changing world" – one that demands public trust through unwavering editorial standards.
