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Something I learned teaching English in China. People who learn English as a second language and whose native language doesn't use latin letters have an extrem

by mattm 16y ago

Something I learned teaching English in China. People who learn English as a second language and whose native language doesn't use latin letters have an extremely difficult time reading words in ALL CAPITALS. I was amazed when I gave a class a handout once which had sentences in all caps and they had an extremely tough time reading it. Since many people do not read each individual letter, but read by looking at the word, putting a word in all capitals changes the structure of the word and makes it more difficult to read.

GFischer 16y ago
Hmm... maybe they didn't learn English the way it "should" be learnt, but applied the way Chinese use letters? (aren't ideograms supposed to convey the meaning? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters) I don't think Russians or other people that use the Cyrillic alphabet, or Greeks have the same problem - so I believe it's not the different character set, but the ideograms. Learning a language as an adult is hard, I just wonder if it might have something to do with that. (I never had problems reading German or Portuguese in all capitals, or other languages I've tried learning, but they're almost the same language as English or Spanish when compared to an ideogram)
- julsonl 16y ago
  Having studied both Chinese and English, I agree with you. Once you possess some sort of mastery with the English alphabet, you can more or less pronounce words phonetically. You might not know the meaning, but you could at least read it. With Chinese, Mandarin in particular, either you know the word or you don't. There might be clues to the word that (equivalent to English prefixes, roughly) allow you to associate it with an ideogram that you recognize and guess its pronunciation, but then you have to choose among 4 intonations of saying it.
- lionheart 16y ago
  As a Russian reader and the son of two Russian parents who sometimes had problems with learning English later in life, I can agree with you there 100%. Of all the weird English rules, idiosyncrasies, etc. that would confuse my parents time and time again, words in all-capitals were never one of them. I'd chock this up to the Chinese alphabet. It's all to do with what your original language has and doesn't have. My parents still can't understand why you need the word "the" or where you're supposed to use it, since Russian doesn't have anything like it.

by mattm 16y ago

GFischer 16y ago

Hmm... maybe they didn't learn English the way it "should" be learnt, but applied the way Chinese use letters? (aren't ideograms supposed to convey the meaning? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters) I don't think Russians or other people that use the Cyrillic alphabet, or Greeks have the same problem - so I believe it's not the different character set, but the ideograms. Learning a language as an adult is hard, I just wonder if it might have something to do with that. (I never had problems reading German or Portuguese in all capitals, or other languages I've tried learning, but they're almost the same language as English or Spanish when compared to an ideogram)

julsonl 16y ago
Having studied both Chinese and English, I agree with you. Once you possess some sort of mastery with the English alphabet, you can more or less pronounce words phonetically. You might not know the meaning, but you could at least read it. With Chinese, Mandarin in particular, either you know the word or you don't. There might be clues to the word that (equivalent to English prefixes, roughly) allow you to associate it with an ideogram that you recognize and guess its pronunciation, but then you have to choose among 4 intonations of saying it.
lionheart 16y ago
As a Russian reader and the son of two Russian parents who sometimes had problems with learning English later in life, I can agree with you there 100%. Of all the weird English rules, idiosyncrasies, etc. that would confuse my parents time and time again, words in all-capitals were never one of them. I'd chock this up to the Chinese alphabet. It's all to do with what your original language has and doesn't have. My parents still can't understand why you need the word "the" or where you're supposed to use it, since Russian doesn't have anything like it.