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My personal experience studying Japanese for a few years makes me skeptical of this claim. Granted, the radicals, etc in the symbols can give you a hint of thei
by ryusage 14y ago
My personal experience studying Japanese for a few years makes me skeptical of this claim. Granted, the radicals, etc in the symbols can give you a hint of their meaning, but ultimately a writing system is created to communicate vocalized words.
In fact, many of the "hints" in the written symbols are based on words that sound similar to other words when pronounced (their actual meaning being unrelated), which is fully lost if you cut out the vocalization. As another point, most words are written with multiple symbols, and the meaning of the overall word may be rather different than the words you would get if you read the symbols individually. At that point, I don't see any difference from a word written with an alphabet like English.
- unavoidable 14y agoYou and the poster below mention Japanese as an example. I counter by saying that Japanese use of Kanji is very different than the Chinese use. I am a native Chinese speaker and have taken Japanese classes, and their vocalization in the language are very different. Japanese places a heavy emphasis on how the characters are pronounced because their language is not purely ideographic; rather they use a hybrid phonetic and ideographic system which forces the reader to vocalize sentences including the Kanji characters. I posit that if you were a native Chinese speaker, you could skim (or speed read as claimed in the article) without any subvocalization and still understand the given passage.
- ryusage 14y agoHm...fair enough. I'm still skeptical, honestly, but I don't know enough about Chinese specifically to argue with that. I do see your point about Japanese being a mixture of systems.