Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

If you can read English well you probably had no problem reading the previous paragraph, in spite of the fact that only the shortest words are spelled correctly. It turns out that once you learn to read a language well…

your brain does not piece the sounds together the way a beginner would. Eventually you just look at the word as a whole, understand the word, and go on the the next one. Which is why you can still understand words with terrible spelling. Actually you can comprehend entire lines at one time, but that is a subject for an article on speed reading.

You can have a lot of fun with this fact by making up your own paragraphs with wildly misspelled words and then showing them to teachers who think they know how reading works. Probably reading works in a much different way for beginners, than it does after you know how to read the language well.

Paragraphs with badly misspelled words, are very difficult for beginning readers to read, so we can clearly recommend that you still learn how to sound out Russian letters use that method at least in part when learning to read. However it’s important to understand that there may be much more we can learn about how reading, and learning to read, works.