My parents have told me that I started to read on my own just before I turned three. I called my mom this evening to be sure, because I don’t remember how I learned to read or when, and I have no memory of a time when I couldn’t read or didn’t. Here’s a shortened (and significantly less cloying) version of the story that my mom tells:
I found you sitting on the floor reading one of your books [aloud] to yourself. … I thought that maybe you had memorized it, because we would read to you all the time. I asked you to pick out some other books and read them to me, and you did—word for word. So finally, I took you to the library to pick out some new books that you wouldn’t have ever seen before. When we got home with them, you dumped them on to the floor in your room and began to read them [aloud] to me.
I’m always skeptical of this story. I asked her some questions to determine more exactly what she means by “reading.” Was I reading word-for-word, or was I just describing the pictures in similar language to what was written? (Word-for-word.) Was I sounding words out? (Sometimes.) How did I learn to do that? (Not sure.) Did you teach me? (No.) Did dad? (Let me ask him. … No.)
And she added, “John, these were easy books, like Word Bird.”
At least in my experience, learning has always been a process of learning to “feel,” which I mean in at least two distinct ways here. I mean it to refer to what is sometimes called the “art” of a subject (as opposed to the “science”), where you can improvise because (and only because) you’ve internalized the parameters and because you love what you’re doing. But I’m also talking about kinesthetically feeling emotions, words, and ideas. Although I cannot be sure, I think that this is how I learned to read (e.g. what is this word like when you hear it or say it yourself? is it dull or scintillating?) Now, still, I have very specific ideas about how things, reading and writing especially, should and do feel (as sensations) to me. And feeling (in both the emotional and motor senses) is really my primary instrument for reading and writing—critically and creatively.
The alternative explanations for how you were reading those books were interesting, especially the idea that you may have been choosing words close to the text, based on the pictures. Typically with a children’s book, the words let you know what’s happening in the images, but by reversing it and letting the images inform the text gives a new translation of the book for you.
This possible reinterpretation of a story aligns with what I would call “passing” literacy, where a person can assemble clues and experiences of a composition, such as looking at pictures or hearing the story read, to derive the correct approximation of meaning from piece, without reading exactly what’s there.
While I’m not sure if this is accurate, I’ve heard that the shapes and colors of traffic signs are universal. I’d liken this explanation of reading the story by describing the pictures in your own words to seeing a stop sign, written in Polish, and still knowing to stop because it’s written on a red octagon, not because it says “zatrzymać”.