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.
> 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 ).
But do these characters correspond to sounds?
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?
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)?
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.
> 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 :)
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.
>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.
> 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?)
> 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.)
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…
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.
> 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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Kids going to trade school after 9th grade are fairly common in many lower tier cities, and many of the poorer provinces. Technically urban, but bringing the average down.
But ok, Chinese is semi-logographic/semi-phonetic (many words are made just by characters with the right sound) at this point, which is a confusing hot mess and requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school (well, at least for city kids).
I’m talking about kids between 6 and 11 years old so dropping out in 9th grade seems not completely relevant. But if we’re talking about subsegments of the population bringing down the average, removing a few low performing states from the US would drastically change the average here too.
>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school
I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.
To be followed by a life of trying to remember the f**ing classical Chinese character that you read once 30 years ago, used twice and now can neither remember nor find in a dictionary.
I see this almost every time I meet with Chinese friends: they have forgotten one or more particular ideograms that have a particular meaning and simply cannot recover them w/o extensive discussion with their educated Chinese peers. They chalk it up to their faulty memory: I chalk it up to a faulty language.
sachertorte (well, "sarchertech") says "Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language."
Apparently not enough to be mentioned on this thread!8-))
Here's an interesting Reddit thread that discusses modern languages on a scale ranging from purely phonetic to purely logographic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/bv7r1p/wh...
While I must admit I would give a rat's ass (but not much more) to know any common logographic language today, I would never go to the trouble to learn one. The effort is simply too great, the payoff too limited, and there are other better ways to use the rest of my life.
US students are expected to be able to read 104 characters by the end of 6th grade. While Chinese students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time.
Characters in Chinese can be combined to make more words, and you need around 9k words in English to read a novel and 2k characters in Chinese to read a novel.
It is wrong to compare number of characters in English to number of words in Chinese. The proper comparison would be words in English to words in Chinese. By 4th grade I knew enough English to proofread ycombinator posts. Of course, that is a low bar...
And I think you're off by an order of magnitude about vocabulary size. Chinese vocabulary size around 6th grade is more like 2K - 4k words tops, not 20K. See
https://www.guavarama.com/2015/02/06/chinese-characters-by-g...
I get that there are tradeoffs and that logographic languages have advantages and disadvantages.
In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.
It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.
> 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.