deadass whenever I forget my ABCs I just use the ABC song, please God tell me people still know the ABC song right?! We-we haven't forgotten it right?!
(sorry had to edit 'cos I read back my comment and it made no sense to me : P)
I'm only adding a final edit to say that I am so happy I'm not the only adult who still sings it whenever I sort stuff
I was at a library baby group recently and they sang the new version. The librarian had to do it slowly for the parents because everyone kept getting tripped up and trying to do it the regular way
Saw a thread recently where someone was asking for stories about my city from the olden days (they worded it slightly more tactfully). Opened it up because I also like to hear about the olden days.
Motherfucker specifically wanted to hear from old folk who were BORN BEFORE 2000. Which was the year I turned 20. Absolutely brutal personal attack.
Edit for the downvoters: I don't use sarcasm tags because I refuse to contribute to the death of literacy, but the joke is that vaccines are why you're still alive and still getting older and didn't die 6 years ago to stop the counter.
What I don't get about this change is that the song isn't the only way kids learn the alphabet. When I was a kid we did individual letters with example words alongside the song. The song is just an additional fun thing to help remember. If the song is all the kid knows then lmnop sounding like a word is the least of their problems. God I'm 20 and talking like a miserable boomer.
Some younger kids have trouble with lmnop because unless you enunciate them clearly, it very much sounds like "elomenopee", which is obviously not a real word but the letters themselves kind of get lost
But zero adults think this so it was clearly never ever actually a problem. Just a funny little quirk that is always straightened out with a 100% success rate.
People out there solving problems that do not exist
Do they not learn the letters before the song anymore? I was in kindergarten a long-ass time ago, but we learned the letters first, then Mrs. Greimel taught us the song to help us remember.
My kids all learned the song first, they could sing it but didn't recognize the letters by sight, at first. And my youngest is 3, knows the song, and about half his letters.
Okay, but why? Maybe I just didn't notice but I don't recall really anyone struggling with it at all growing up. This sounds like a solution to a problem that isn't actually real.
To be fair it used to confuse me as a kid too, it was the hardest part of alphabet for me when i was like 5. (as my third language) so we learned it like this: H I J K L M N (pause) O P Q R S T U (pause). And i grew up acing every subject.
Its not how we were thought it as children in my country, and in many european countries they dont do elemenope. Works well enough i would say, seeing as almost everyone is at the very minimum, bilingual.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Not sure how it would confuse children who are actively learning the alphabet. You're confused because the concept is rigid/established in your brain but it's all new to the kids learning.
It seems easy because we got used to it, but it really doesn't fit
For the span of 5 letters, you essentially double or even triple the rate at which you say letters in an attempt to pass them off as one letter for the pacing, but it is still slightly slow so it still doesn't work. It feels like a forced attempt to include it into the jingle, which I am quite sure it is.
It is also harder to count in it, (as in which position in the alphabet) for everything before it is extremely easy to count the letters as they come up, but LMNOP is just so fast and mashed together that even my adult brain has to put some focus for a moment to count them and my hands can just barely keep up.
For adults this is not hard enough to really impact our quality of life (except for very specific circumstances), but for a child learning the alphabet for the first time and has learned to count recently, even the parts before LMNOP would probably be fairly difficult, so I can imagine LMNOP's massive difficulty spike is a problem.
As stated by others it also sounds like a word, again due to how fast you say it compared to the other letters, so there might be some brain processing stuff going on there also.
This was hard to READ, and i didn't even grow up with the song, bc i am from a non-english speaking country, and the song i learned is somewhat close to that
Here in Finland, it's almost like that, but with a different ending: ABCDEFG – HIJKLMN – OPQRSTU – VXYZÅÄÖ. We just straight up omit W so that we can fit in ÅÄÖ, which is kind of funny. (But in Finnish, it's "double V", not "double U", so it's kinda included in the V, I guess.)
That was the first part I memorized though... it needs to be hard so students can be motivated to learn it by themselves. Also, making R-S-T a bundle is a death sentence, because they're all about equally common in the alphabet
As the father of a 4 year old who learned the new way and a 13 year old who learned the old way the new way is better. My 4 year old had the letters down in a day or two, my 13 year old had the song down in a day or two, but would mumble her way through "LMNOP" and it took a bit to break that habit.
Furthermore I think people are under the assumption that the song way is never taught which isn't true. As soon as they get their letters down you teach them the song, and now instead of mumbling through LMNOP they just sing it correctly.
In Spanish we sing a pause after N too, but after that it's kinda different, since we have an extra letter and the names are longer
HIJKLMN - ÑOPQ - RSTUV - WX - YZ
That's the way I was taught it, nearly forty years ago. Actually, no, not quite, take out the third pause, as W being three syllables fills the gap without needing a pause.
Notably, though, the version I was taught had only the letters, no need for all the "now I know..." crap at the end. (The tune diverged from the 'twinkle twinkle' origins to give it a clean ending - instead of the UVWXYZ note sequence being G-G-FFF-E-E-D it went G-G-FGA-E-D-C.)
Ngl, I don't remember the version I heard had this many pauses here, it went like the following:
O-P-Q-R-S-T-U (pause) V, W and X-Y-Z
There's a pause after G and another after N in my version of the ABC song. So 3 pauses in the whole song, the version from your comment is something I have never came across before and I'm terrified of it.
lots of schools teach a version that doesn't rhyme anymore lol. in an attempt to stop the lmnop section from being a "run", since they claimed students find it too difficult to learn
I think it's more in the cadence of the song. E, L, T, and Y, get emphasized a little bit more than the other letters, so you might be hearing that as a pause.
I just dont get though that learning abcs is basically square one. if they cant learn that, that is your problem as a teacher. you cant exactly blame it on previous habits or poor teaching. youre literally basically the beginning of formal schooling.
In my opinion, this might be why some kids start out behind.
My kids definitely knew their letters and alphabet well before starting school. I think a lot of kids do.
I'm not saying parents should sit down little kids and teach them letters in a formal way. Instead, if you're always reading things to your kid (books, yes, but not just books!), they'll start pointing at words and signs and asking what it says.
Let's say a kid is pointing to a breakfast sign on the street. You can point out the letter B on it. "See that letter? It's a B. Buh, buh, buh..." and then you can move your finger along the whole word as you say, "Bacon. Oh, they must sell bacon inside."
Kids learn that the letters make sounds, and the writing represents words, and those words give us information.
Not all of that can be taught in school. Teachers can teach letters and sound, but understanding the importance of it comes from interacting with the real world. I think if parents took those pre-literacy steps with their kids, it would help them out a lot.
Then why kids 10 years ago could learn the alphabet just fine and now so many struggle ? There are some kids who can no longer sit on a bench without falling every second, for some reason there are now quite a few that can't stay still, they have to be doing things at all times. That has nothing to do with teachers, parents have a role to play too.
Mind you, it's not the kids claiming it's too difficult at that age. It's the parents.
I'm a teacher. I've taught as young as 3 (and as old as 75) and my students could learn the song in about a month or two of classes. Some kids came to class knowing it because the parents taught them. And then you spend the next few months doing about 2-4 letters per week to build phonics, recognition, CVC words, and learning the individual letters that have exceptions (long vs short vowels, soft vs hard Cs&Gs, silent vowels, etc.) so that the run is just fun.
4 months. Half a school year for basically babies and they can have the alphabet mastered and be reading but the parents (and teachers) have to put in the work.
It's not like they've changed the alphabet, it just stops kids getting stuck at that weird elemenopee run in the middle and helps them differentiate between the letters at an earlier age.
though if the hard part is lmnop, why replace it with wxyz, which is arguably harder. it even has more syllables. and make the entire song not rhyme anymore on top of that
I think it's because the hard sounds of W X Y Z gives a clearer vocal seperation. Few children are sounding out a single letter called doubleyouexx or whyzee but ellem or ennoo blend together easier.
I'm a middle-aged father of two and I still have to sing the song sometimes, I'm not gonna shame anyone for what they call it...as long as they know the actual letters.
Dude. They got rid of phonics and instead use sight words and tapping words out. I’m sure it does something but we ended up using phonics at home, our daughter learned to read words she didnt know much easier with phonics.
I learned with phonics and I was obsessed with reading by 3 years old, I would demolish any books I could get my hands on, by 5th grade I had a "college" reading level. Kids just 3-4 years below me where not taught with phonics and by the time I was in high school, the younger kids could not read shit. If a teacher gave them an assignment with a word they didn't recognize they where unable to sound out the word, unable to use context clues to guess the meaning, even unable to recognize parts of the word that may have been derived from other words they did know. If it wasn't already in their "sight reading memory" they would just skip straight over it. I also had classes with multiple kids who didn't know how to read an analog clock and would beg me to tell them the time during class when they weren't allowed to look at their phones.
That‘s amazingly dumb. That‘s not how humans work. There‘s a reason why all of the oldest oral tales in history are in metric or rhyme and were traditionally sung, because that‘s how they are remembered best
thats what im saying, the people saying the song still works fine are completely missing the importance and benefit of the rhyme itself. its not an accident the original rhymes
it still follows twinkle twinkle little star. but, at least in the version i learnt, the part that would be "what you are" is "LMNOP". and in the newer version its just "LMN". so the rest is adjusted accordingly so all the letters fit. the point was to remove LMNOP as a single phrase. but now the rhyme structure is broken
I know right?!! I admit I only ever use the song when I'm focusing on sorting 'n if my brain's stretched too far across other thoughts but like, it-it's- I- how?!
I can recite the alphabet just fine, but i couldnt tell you whatever letter came after S for example without running it through my head. I can atleast start from the letter M so i dont have to run through it all.
Forget? Forget??? How can anyone forget the alphabet??? Never in my life would I have assumed people forget something so simple, ever. This is depressing.
Yeah it couldn’t possibly be a tongue-in-cheek joke about how often chat gpt gives incorrect information, it’s a definite unequivocal argument that DemDangYouths™ are dumb as shit and can’t remember an incredibly basic part of the language they speak.
It’s fun watching Redditors slowly turn into the people they hated ten years ago; some real digital boomers😂
While I do know it because of how much American television I've consumed, I never needed it. Is crazy that so many people need it for something so simple
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u/PennyCat83 Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
deadass whenever I forget my ABCs I just use the ABC song, please God tell me people still know the ABC song right?! We-we haven't forgotten it right?!
(sorry had to edit 'cos I read back my comment and it made no sense to me : P)
I'm only adding a final edit to say that I am so happy I'm not the only adult who still sings it whenever I sort stuff