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hirvi74says >"1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context mus

hirvi74says >"1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too."< In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics. I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us. English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.

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khuey 1y ago
> In Chinese each word is a unique character. This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
- lisper 1y ago
  But do these characters correspond to sounds?
  - acyou 1y ago
    Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
      - khuey 1y ago
        Yes, because "葡" only has one pronunciation. But there are other characters like "行" that have multiple pronunciations that vary depending on the word they appear in.
akoboldfrying 1y ago
> In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese. We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well. I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)
- mook 1y ago
  Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after. Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…
- khuey 1y ago
  > Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China? Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century. Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries. Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and). Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters. They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin. It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.
ginko 1y ago
>English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese. "At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.
zozbot234 1y ago
> So there is no phonics system for Chinese. Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.
altairprime 1y ago
> But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for sharing it in particular :)
mannykannot 1y ago
These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.) I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.

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khuey 1y ago

> In Chinese each word is a unique character. This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).

lisper 1y ago
But do these characters correspond to sounds?
- acyou 1y ago
  Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
  - HappMacDonald 1y ago
    I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
    - khuey 1y ago
      Yes, because "葡" only has one pronunciation. But there are other characters like "行" that have multiple pronunciations that vary depending on the word they appear in.

akoboldfrying 1y ago

> In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese. We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well. I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)

mook 1y ago
Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after. Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…
khuey 1y ago
> Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China? Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century. Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)
peterfirefly 1y ago
The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries. Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and). Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters. They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin. It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.

ginko 1y ago

>English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese. "At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.

zozbot234 1y ago

> So there is no phonics system for Chinese. Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.

altairprime 1y ago

> But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for sharing it in particular :)

mannykannot 1y ago

These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.) I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.