Use of the syllable as a unit for initial acquisition of reading is advocated. It is argued that since English alphabetic writing is based on a mapping between sound-stream and symbol, a decoding approach is necessary at early stages of the acquisition process. However, conventional phonics methods confound two very difficult tasks in initial learning: (1) acquiring the notion that the orthography tracks sound directly and meaning only indirectly; and (2) understanding that the alphabetic unit corresponds to the highly abstract phonological unit, or phoneme, which is both difficult to pronounce in isolation and difficult to recognize and blend. On the basis of research in speech perception, it is suggested that syllables are more natural units than phonemes because they are easily pronounceable in isolation and easy to recognize and blend. Introduction to a syllabary will teach children the basic notion of sound-tracking uncontaminated by simultaneous introduction of the difficult and inaccessible phoneme unit. Preliminary evidence that a simple 23-element syllabary can be acquired with ease by inner-city and suburban kindergarteners is presented. In particular, it is shown that this population can blend previously untaught combinations of known syllables to form and comprehend new multisyllabic words. (Author/TO)