In Week 11, I taught Billy how to “see”. I gave him a new tool called “sounding it out” that would help him break down big scary words into simple sequences of easy-to-spell syllables. But what if Billy never learned to “see”?
Billy could hypothetically grow up never learning how to “see” syllables. To learn how to spell a new word, he would copy it onto a piece of paper, paying close attention to the sequence of each letter, and then repeat this process over and over again until the word finally commits itself to his aural, visual, and muscle memory—it becomes instinct.
If that hypothetical sounds way too hypothetical—you must not be Chinese.
Consider that there is no phonetic alphabet in the Chinese language. When students of Chinese learn to write, they are committing thousands of individual characters to memory, associating words with patterns that often contain no phonetic cues whatsoever. They have no tool other than brute force memorization to help them through this process.
Memorizing three to four thousand different characters in order to write: sounds like hell, doesn't it? I thought so too until I recalled that one, really cool Princeton study that people plastered all over their AIM profiles and mass-forwarded in e-mails several years ago. Remember? It went something like this:
A Priecnton stduy reaelved that flnuet Eglnsih reaedrs don't denped on phonetic cues but rahter learn to reogncize shpaes and pattrens in context wehn reidang.
If you showed that to a first year "English as a foreign language" student, his head would probably explode! But assuming you have native English fluency, that previous passage should have been pretty damn cool! It means that after a while, we don't really "read" anymore; that is,(take a deep breath) we're not really grouping individual letters into syllables and then connecting them to form a complete sound that our brain then recognizes as a word with meaning (exhale). Like the Chinese, we just look at pictures.
Now the benefit of having a written language based on phonetic characters is that if you can’t remember how to draw the picture, you can always “sound it out”. For new initiates to the language, this tool functions like a pair of training wheels, easing them into fluency. After repeated exposure over many many years through books, newspapers, magazines, and TV, they learn to draw most pictures by heart, and “sounding it out” is no longer necessary.
(How many pictures, you ask? Estimates put the figure for basic English literacy at about 3 to 4 thousand words. Interestingly enough, this is pretty much the same number of characters a literate Chinese speaker must commit to memory.)
My friend Steven, who taught English in Shenzhen, China, mentioned something interesting once about how his less advanced English students deal with new vocabulary words. Apparently, the idea of a standardized system of phonetic cues is so foreign to Chinese students that they won't even try to pronounce new words.
Take the word CAT. Show it to any American preschool student and they will go: "Cat. Kuh- Ah - Tuh. Cat."
Flash to China: when Steven shows the word CAT to his students, they will stare at him blankly or fidget in their seats until he gives up in frustration and screams "MIAO! MIAO! MIAO! IT'S A $%&^*# CAT!" His students then go home and patiently write the word CAT fifty times, repeating it out loud each time, until it is finally committed to memory.
Chinese students never learn how to "see" syllables; "sounding it out" is not a tool in their toolbox. When it comes to writing, the Chinese don't believe in training wheels—it's do or die.
I would have to disagree on a particular point. Chinese does have training wheels and it's called bo-po-mo-fo. At least I had those when I first learnt Chinese. It was written right to the Chinese character. Later on as we got into higher levels, they would drop them completely. Chinese children comics also had them. Of course I learnt the Taiwanese Chinese (traditional). Maybe simplified Chinese is taught differently?
ReplyDeleteJapanese also has a similar system, and it's called furigana where they have hiragana next to kanji, once again as an aid to children who may not necessarily know how to read the kanji yet.
I was also weaned on Taiwanese Mandarin, and learned the zhuyin fuhao syllabary. I did consider whether or not to mention this in the piece, but ultimately decided against it as it wasn't central to the point I was trying to get across, which is that there are many different ways of reaching the same goal.
ReplyDeleteThis piece was a bit zany because I took an old facebook note I wrote from years ago and tried to adapt it to an idea that I wanted to explore. Obviously it did not work very well.
This piece should have focused exclusively on the writing aspect of Chinese (in which case zhuyin fuhao really is of little value), but trying to adapt an earlier work to a different idea forced me to broaden that focus. =(
Good catch Krunk! I'll take another look and maybe repost in a few. Thanks!
Hey Earl,
ReplyDeleteSaw your post and thought I'd put in a comment since I've researched a lot on children, language acquisition, and issues with script.
So there's actually this EALC professor at Penn, Victor Mair, who specializes in Sinitic scripts. He's not on my dissertation committee since I don't deal singularly with script, but he's kind of my mentor here, since he's probably the only person who cares about Chinese languages other than Mandarin. Chinese characters are actually semanto-phonetic (comprised of meaning+sound). Some (like fewer than 3%) are ideographs, but most are semanto-phonetic. And there are phonetic cues embedded in characters that allow readers to "guess" how they should be pronounced (媽，嗎，碼，瑪) or their meaning (驫) albeit not always ultra precisely.
The Western concept of "syllable" is, well, Western, for lack of a better word. All individual Chinese characters are monosyllabic (C)V(C), combined together to form words, so the idea of breaking words into syllables the way we do it in English will obviously be different than in any variety of Chinese. The actual processes of how children learn to read/write Chinese characters still puzzle researchers (my own MA advisor included!) but their work does show that children who know pinyin (which involves a more traditional "phonetic" spelling system) and those who do Zhuyin fuhao learn differently than those in say Hong Kong, where neither of these are used. Educationally this does not mean one place fares "better" or "worse" than others (though people have used these arguments to say X version should be learned - assumptions, I believe, are more grounded in politics than anything else), but just that there's so much diversity within Chineses that it's super hard to generalize. Just some food for thought, I guess.
Not sure if you know of this work called 說文解字 written by 許慎, which may be of interest to you. There's the old school classical Chinese version (which is a pain to read, but quite elucidating) but there's also the condensed version that I know Hong Kong secondary school students are required to read, which is good for a quick and dirty summary. Kind of interesting to see how people in China viewed language (that is, premodern China, I guess) versus how modern day people looking at China/Chineses view language (syllable v. rhyme, for one). There's really quite a difference!
At any rate, I enjoyed your post! Good to know there are actually other people interested in such issues out there :)