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>I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading. This i
by Mirioron 7y ago
>I wonder if there's anyone out there who can read a non-alphabetic language (e.g. Chinese) but doesn't even know how to pronounce what they're reading.
This is actually how many people learn Japanese. They get an anki deck with kanji and their meanings and learn from that. The decks might have some pronunciations of the kanji, but typically not all of the pronunciations (or people don't learn them). This leads to a situation where they can read text and understand most (all?) of it, but would have difficulty reading it out loud.
Japanese kanji (and Chinese hanzi) are logographic. Each symbol denotes a word or a phrase and depending on the context it can have a different pronunciation, however the meanings generally stay rather similar.
- tsimionescu 7y agoBut that wouldn't help with avoiding subvocalizing. If you know one pronunciation, even if it's not the correct one, you can still subvocalize. One thing I noticed about myself is that I often subvocalize large numbers (say, 64521) in my native language, especially when I'm reading a language I'm not fluent in.
- Mirioron 7y agoPerhaps we're different then, because when I see a large number I just skip over it unless the specific number is important. I'll essentially leave it as a blank. I think sub vocalization for kanji that you don't know the pronunciation of would be the same. On the other hand, perhaps this is not the best example, because somebody learning the language would already be slow enough at reading that sub-vocalization wouldn't make a difference.