My 5 year old is learning to read and write in English; his spoken English is quite good (his pronunciation is way better than mine of course), but I'm at loss of how to teach him properly to map the written to the spoken word (and the reverse mapping is even harder); he seems to be learning fine anyway.
What's your definition of "sane" here?
>The problem is that they are two unrelated languages
Sounds like Chinese/Mandarin to me. :)
I do not understand what do you mean here. In spoken English, the only way to know about one word is by having heard it, so you know how it is pronounced. Illiterate people can speak perfectly correct English.
Then you move, and local people (in UK, say) pronounce the word differently (eg bath, heard).