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> 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

> 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.
- HappMacDonald 1y ago
  > old-fashioned paper dictionaries Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries? (this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.
sarchertech 1y ago
> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets. I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Character aren’t words though, and many words are at least two characters. Heck, most given names are two characters. 3k characters covers most of the words frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters that you don’t learn by sixth grade aren’t as useful (well, 囧 can be used as an emoji in a pinch).
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read. Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Most Chinese in urban schools are mostly literate by sixth grade, and can probably read simple articles by 7-8 years old. The average time to read is probably brought down by rural schools, people forget China still isn’t all rich cities with college-bound students in public schools past the last compulsory 9th grade.
      - sarchertech 1y ago
        It’s likely that the rural students are bringing the average down, but it seems less likely they could bring the average down so far given that only 1/3 of the country is rural. Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn. Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.

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.

HappMacDonald 1y ago
> old-fashioned paper dictionaries Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries? (this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
- peterfirefly 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.

sarchertech 1y ago

> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets. I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Character aren’t words though, and many words are at least two characters. Heck, most given names are two characters. 3k characters covers most of the words frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters that you don’t learn by sixth grade aren’t as useful (well, 囧 can be used as an emoji in a pinch).
- sarchertech 1y ago
  That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read. Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    Most Chinese in urban schools are mostly literate by sixth grade, and can probably read simple articles by 7-8 years old. The average time to read is probably brought down by rural schools, people forget China still isn’t all rich cities with college-bound students in public schools past the last compulsory 9th grade.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      It’s likely that the rural students are bringing the average down, but it seems less likely they could bring the average down so far given that only 1/3 of the country is rural. Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn. Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.