7 ms·

This idea is fascinating and makes me wonder if languages like Chinese are naturally learned this way, since that’s really the only way to learn it.

_nalply 6y ago
Perhaps you should consider that characters are not images but consist of distinct groups of strokes. When I learned about 20 words suddenly I realized that some of them have sub-words embedded into them. So it's a bit more complicated.
- Izkata 6y ago
  My favorite example of this, because it looks kinda silly and yet makes perfect sense (and appears to be the same between Chinese and Japanese, where I first ran across it): 木 - tree 森 - forest
  - canjobear 6y ago
    林 is also forest
    - ithkuil 6y ago
      One is natural the other one is man made (similar to many other languages discriminating between woods and forest)
jdietrich 6y ago
Chinese schools teach using phonics - specifically, using a phonetic transcription system based on the Latin script called pinyin. Thanks to the exact correspondence between spelling and Standard Chinese pronunciation, this system can be rapidly mastered. Once students have a working command of pinyin, they are taught to associate traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) with the pinyin words that they already recognise. The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; As a second-language user of Mandarin Chinese, I am indescribably grateful for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693
- krackers 6y ago
  That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?
  - musicale 6y ago
    Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
    - livueta 6y ago
      Yeah, 音読み - literally sound-reading. There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi. It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before. On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.
musicale 6y ago
Phonetic alphabets (e.g. pinyin) are used by learners as well as in computer input methods. Moreover, some 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic hybrids (though the pronunciation of characters that share a phonetic element may not be identical in current Mandarin, they will often resemble each other closely, perhaps with a tone or vowel shift.) Learning characters in phonetic groups helps to anchor their pronunciation and phonetic elements can help when you encounter an unfamiliar character in context.
prox 6y ago
Sanskrit is interesting because all symbols are direct phonetic representations. If you hear a sound, you know how to write it. This is why it was able to be super effective at keeping the texts intact through centuries of passing down texts orally.
- mkl 6y ago
  Sanskrit has the big advantage for that purpose of being "dead" (not taught as a first language), so its existence is academic and pronunciation is relatively fixed through time; Latin would be similar, and its alphabet, this one we're typing, is a good phonetic representation. The pronunciation of "living" languages changes quite a bit. Most languages with phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, syllabary, etc., but not pure abjad [1]) have direct phonetic representations. English, French, and a few other European languages are unusual. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad
  - prox 6y ago
    Besides being dead as a reason for it being fixed, I think it might also reflect the high reliance on the oral transmission of texts (which your excellent examples I hadn’t heard about emphasize) The name for learning (sacred) texts in Sanskrit is “shruti” , that which is heard. Sanskrit grammar did change over time, at least until Panini wrote down the rules around the 6th century bc.
  - prox 6y ago
    Also, something I just remembered, in vedic rituals there is actually a priest present who checks if the ritual and the sanskrit recitation is correct. This is also a reason we still have access to vedic sanskrit and we can be confident in its transmission accuracy afaik.
est 6y ago
Native speaker here. Other comments are not wrong but not complete. There are several phases of Chinese (the text) learning 1. Mapping your daily voices to phonics and to the characters 2. Expand your vocabulary with phonic tools like PinYin And the most important part: 3. Learn new words and meanings without any involvements of phonics at all. Many native speakers can comprehend the concept of a word at young age and when they have grown up and put those words into speeches they found they have the wrong pronunciation or word order. LOL. Chinese words are ideograms and can be linked to "pictures" without proper pronunciation. Also Chinese is analytic language so people can literally guess its meaning from contexts.
tomjohnneill 6y ago
Something I found fascinating about learning Chinese while living in China was knowing exactly what a character meant (because it was written on signs etc.), but having absolutely no idea how it was pronounced.
bart_spoon 6y ago
Its funny you mention that because I instantly thought of Japanese. I spent a few years there and learned to speak fairly well, but never learned to read much beyond the phonetically based character systems (hiragana and katakana), but never more than a hundred or so of the commonly used kanji. And while kanji are technically associated with specific sounds, there are tens of thousands of them, and they all can have different sounds in different situations. Since returning from Japan, I've been trying to do some studying of kanji with mixed success, and I find that it virtually requires the type of thinking here: trying to determine what the word would be based on context, as well as connecting the symbols in the kanji (which often do have meaning) words.

_nalply 6y ago

Perhaps you should consider that characters are not images but consist of distinct groups of strokes. When I learned about 20 words suddenly I realized that some of them have sub-words embedded into them. So it's a bit more complicated.

Izkata 6y ago
My favorite example of this, because it looks kinda silly and yet makes perfect sense (and appears to be the same between Chinese and Japanese, where I first ran across it): 木 - tree 森 - forest
- canjobear 6y ago
  林 is also forest
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    One is natural the other one is man made (similar to many other languages discriminating between woods and forest)

jdietrich 6y ago

Chinese schools teach using phonics - specifically, using a phonetic transcription system based on the Latin script called pinyin. Thanks to the exact correspondence between spelling and Standard Chinese pronunciation, this system can be rapidly mastered. Once students have a working command of pinyin, they are taught to associate traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) with the pinyin words that they already recognise. The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; As a second-language user of Mandarin Chinese, I am indescribably grateful for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693

krackers 6y ago
That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?
- musicale 6y ago
  Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it. Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
  - livueta 6y ago
    Yeah, 音読み - literally sound-reading. There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi. It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before. On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.

musicale 6y ago

Phonetic alphabets (e.g. pinyin) are used by learners as well as in computer input methods. Moreover, some 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic hybrids (though the pronunciation of characters that share a phonetic element may not be identical in current Mandarin, they will often resemble each other closely, perhaps with a tone or vowel shift.) Learning characters in phonetic groups helps to anchor their pronunciation and phonetic elements can help when you encounter an unfamiliar character in context.

prox 6y ago

Sanskrit is interesting because all symbols are direct phonetic representations. If you hear a sound, you know how to write it. This is why it was able to be super effective at keeping the texts intact through centuries of passing down texts orally.

mkl 6y ago
Sanskrit has the big advantage for that purpose of being "dead" (not taught as a first language), so its existence is academic and pronunciation is relatively fixed through time; Latin would be similar, and its alphabet, this one we're typing, is a good phonetic representation. The pronunciation of "living" languages changes quite a bit. Most languages with phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, syllabary, etc., but not pure abjad [1]) have direct phonetic representations. English, French, and a few other European languages are unusual. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad
- prox 6y ago
  Besides being dead as a reason for it being fixed, I think it might also reflect the high reliance on the oral transmission of texts (which your excellent examples I hadn’t heard about emphasize) The name for learning (sacred) texts in Sanskrit is “shruti” , that which is heard. Sanskrit grammar did change over time, at least until Panini wrote down the rules around the 6th century bc.
- prox 6y ago
  Also, something I just remembered, in vedic rituals there is actually a priest present who checks if the ritual and the sanskrit recitation is correct. This is also a reason we still have access to vedic sanskrit and we can be confident in its transmission accuracy afaik.

est 6y ago

Native speaker here. Other comments are not wrong but not complete. There are several phases of Chinese (the text) learning 1. Mapping your daily voices to phonics and to the characters 2. Expand your vocabulary with phonic tools like PinYin And the most important part: 3. Learn new words and meanings without any involvements of phonics at all. Many native speakers can comprehend the concept of a word at young age and when they have grown up and put those words into speeches they found they have the wrong pronunciation or word order. LOL. Chinese words are ideograms and can be linked to "pictures" without proper pronunciation. Also Chinese is analytic language so people can literally guess its meaning from contexts.

tomjohnneill 6y ago

Something I found fascinating about learning Chinese while living in China was knowing exactly what a character meant (because it was written on signs etc.), but having absolutely no idea how it was pronounced.

bart_spoon 6y ago

Its funny you mention that because I instantly thought of Japanese. I spent a few years there and learned to speak fairly well, but never learned to read much beyond the phonetically based character systems (hiragana and katakana), but never more than a hundred or so of the commonly used kanji. And while kanji are technically associated with specific sounds, there are tens of thousands of them, and they all can have different sounds in different situations. Since returning from Japan, I've been trying to do some studying of kanji with mixed success, and I find that it virtually requires the type of thinking here: trying to determine what the word would be based on context, as well as connecting the symbols in the kanji (which often do have meaning) words.