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My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith lan

My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features. Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.

gumby 10y ago
> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic. In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
- thomasfoster96 10y ago
  > In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further. It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia). While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step. This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system. Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is. What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field. For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English: aC -- TRAP vowel aCe -- FACE vowel eC -- DRESS vowel eCe -- FLEECE vowel iC -- KIT vowel iCe -- PRICE vowel oC -- LOT vowel oCe -- GOAT vowel uC -- STRUT vowel uCe -- GOOSE vowel Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").
    - Natanael_L 10y ago
      So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language. The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        > So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
        Gravityloss 10y ago
        English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste. For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating. Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
  - gumby 10y ago
    My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones. What do you mean by "learnable"?
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    "Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is. But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text. The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.

gumby 10y ago

> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic. In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further

thomasfoster96 10y ago
> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further. It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia). While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step. This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system. Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is. What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field. For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English: aC -- TRAP vowel aCe -- FACE vowel eC -- DRESS vowel eCe -- FLEECE vowel iC -- KIT vowel iCe -- PRICE vowel oC -- LOT vowel oCe -- GOAT vowel uC -- STRUT vowel uCe -- GOOSE vowel Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").
  - Natanael_L 10y ago
    So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language. The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      > So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
      - Gravityloss 10y ago
        English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste. For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating. Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize. They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
- gumby 10y ago
  My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones. What do you mean by "learnable"?
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  "Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is. But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text. The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.