Frequently Asked Questions

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Nardagani is inspired by Japan’s reading system called Hiragana. Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The founder of our program learned to read Japanese in a week when she lived there. She has since adapted this system for English. Both Hiragana and Nardagani use symbols to help students learn to read quickly and easily. The Hiragana method uses 46 symbols. The Nardagani method uses only 12 simple symbols.

With the App, coming soon, students of all ages can go through the program solo to learn to read, and correctly pronounce English, or anyone can use the App to be a tutor for a student. The lessons contain fun, interactive exercises, and games to help students learn the symbols and use them to decode and read English words quickly and accurately. Short, engaging coded books help students use the symbols to read words in connected text with ease. Once the student has gained confidence and proficiency in sounding out words using the symbols in our books, students are then able to transition into regular text without the symbols.

Students may master the necessary reading skills through a combination of our App, coming soon, solo or with direct instruction from a supportive tutor. A tutor can be a teacher, parent, friend, or mentor who can read and is prepared to spend time with the student guiding instruction. The lessons and games within the App, coming soon, provide differentiated instruction in sound symbol relationships for both English letters and the Nardagani symbols. The App and our additional teaching materials, make it easy for tutors to provide high-engagement, multi-sensory reading instruction.

The Nardagani symbols are like training wheels on a bicycle. Once students are confident and proficient with the coded practice books, they are guided to our suggested reading list of non-coded books. These are books from the library, bookstore, or purchased online. They begin with entertaining, low-level books and progress to higher-level books. Many words have become site words through the course of our program, plus sounding out words has become a skill. This secures a student’s ability to read without the symbols.

This is a critical stage for the student. It is important that the student starts reading with low-level books. This continues to build confidence. We highly recommend the tutor remain engaged with the student during this transition to books without symbols.

The symbols are like training wheels on a bicycle; once the student has confidence in reading, he/she will no longer need them. Upon finishing the Nardagani coded practice books, students are guided to our suggested reading list of non-coded books. These are books from the library, bookstore or purchased online. They begin with entertaining, low-level books and progress to higher-level books. This secures a student’s ability to read without the symbols. It is highly recommended that the parent, tutor or homework buddy continue with the student through the transition to the suggested reading list of books without symbols. As with most things, mastery is accomplished through continued practice.

With the help of 12 simple symbols, a challenged reader can understand and pronounce every sound of each letter with no ambiguities. The guesswork in reading is eliminated. Words go from being confusing to being fascinating. Symbols “live” under letters that make more than one sound, acting as signposts telling the student which way to correctly pronounce the letters and whether the letter is silent or not. Once students learn the meaning of each symbol, they can see at a glance what the word is, effectively creating sight words out of those words that are otherwise difficult to learn and memorize because of the multiple sounds so many of our letters make.

Nardagani is a multi-sensory learning method with auditory, visual, and kinesthetic teaching techniques embedded throughout the App and the teaching materials, so students stay actively engaged and retain the information.

Nardagani is carefully crafted based on the most effective principles for teaching struggling readers… reading instruction that is multi-sensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible, as well as providing students with phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Nardagani teaches every sound of every letter, so the letters make more sense. Nardagani teaches students to sound out words. Once a student sounds out a word enough times, it becomes a sight word, a word the student automatically knows upon seeing it. The Nardagani method reduces cognitive overload for challenged readers by replacing complex phonetic rules (and their exceptions) with our 12 simple and easy-to-understand symbols.

Many students have learned to read using Nardagani on their own.

If your child is struggling to read, offering a different way to learn may be the biggest help and gift of all. Traditional reading methods have failed us. Research shows that 25 percent of our population cannot learn to read with traditional teaching methods.

As a parent, you can purchase the App, coming soon, and put it on a phone or tablet, set it in front of your child, and our avatar will walk your child through the app. Or you can hire a tutor to take your child through the App, coming soon, to teach your child to read. A tutor can be anyone. There is no need to have teaching experience. Our App, coming soon, is very simple, and anyone can learn to follow along to teach it – a family member, friend or mentor.

There will be a TIPS section inside the App, coming soon. You will recieve extra guidance through our TIPS.

Nardagani is designed as a quick solution that will actually allow your child to fully engage in the school’s curriculum. If a student is struggling to learn to read, his or her efforts are likely hampered in learning other subjects. We have seen our students’ knowledge accelerate across all subjects due to their new ability to read.

If English is your child’s first language, on average our students have achieved grade level in about five weeks, especially if you are working through the app for about one-hour per day. In the case of ESL students, the process may take longer.

There are no additional costs. The App will include everything needed to learn Nardagani, including exercises, games and books. There are no additional costs associated with the Nardagani program, unless students choose to work with a tutor at their expense.

We have taught people with autism, dyslexia, and undiagnosed learning disabilities. Students with learning disabilities often struggle to learn through traditional teaching methods. Nardagani uses a unique set of easy to remember symbols to help learning disabled students match the sounds of our language to the letters of our alphabet so they can decode words quickly and easily.

Nardagani was approved by the Idaho State Department of Education in 2012 and continues to be a part of the Idaho State Department of Education.

In April 2016, a small-scale teacher research study was completed by Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm, a nationally recognized literacy expert and professor of English Education at Boise State University. Dr. Wilhelm explored the efficacy of Nardagani on the decoding skills and reading fluency rate of struggling readers in a classroom setting. Dr. Wilhelm concluded that Nardagani was easy for teachers to learn and led to significant improvement in reading skills, especially compared with other reading programs. Please see Dr. Wilhelm’s conclusions on our Testimonial page.

The efficacy of the Nardagani program has also been shown to be successful in pilot programs in detention facilities in Idaho and Oregon. Please see these brief reports at the bottom of our Testimonial page.

Anyone can become a tutor by going through the App completely to understand how Nardagani is taught. Following along with the App, you are ready to teach your first student.

Nardagani is a reading and pronunciation program. ESL students have improved their reading skills considerably and also improved their pronunciation with life-changing results.

The Nardagani App includes visual and auditory cues that enable students to recognize and learn proper pronunciation of each and every English sound.

Have you ever wondered why the letters “ough” can be pronounced in so many different ways? Read these words: though, through, rough, cough, bough, and thorough! OUGH can be pronounced many different ways!

Or why there are so many silent letters like the k in knee and knock, the c in science or the h in ghost? Or why the letters “bow” can mean two different things depending on how they are pronounced? Or why Brits and Americans spell some words differently?

It’s complicated! We only have 26 letters of our alphabet which we use to represent 38 sounds of our language. Many letters make more than one sound, and many sounds are spelled in multiple ways. In addition, many words that have become part of our language originally came from other languages, like Greek, Latin, and French. Thus, there are many rules and exceptions to the rules that need to be learned in traditional phonics instruction. This is the main reason learning to read English is so challenging.

Nardagani eliminates the need to learn all the rules and exceptions, thereby eliminating confusion. The Nardagani symbols are under letters that make more than one sound, guiding the student to use the correct pronunciation of the written word every time. Once students build confidence reading with the symbols students know, they can drop the symbols like training wheels from a bike.

If a student knows how to read in their primary language, he or she may learn to read and pronounce English with our program. Many adults students go through our program solo. You may want to find a tutor to go through our App, then help by going through the App together. A tutor can be a parent, a friend or family member… anyone can be the tutor; our program is that simple!

We use 12 simple symbols that teach every sound in the English language and how to properly pronounce them. Nardagani makes this process easy because the symbols show which sounds to make at a glance. Many programs teach students to memorize commonly used phrases. Nardagani students learn to read the whole text in our practice reading books. Students learn every sound of the English language with our proprietary system.