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Sorry, I just noticed that I didn't really properly respond there. "Reading" can mean "pronouncing" or "comprehending" - I'm arguing that overall comprehension
by T-R 12y ago
Sorry, I just noticed that I didn't really properly respond there. "Reading" can mean "pronouncing" or "comprehending" - I'm arguing that overall comprehension (including both word identification and reading speed) is easier in languages like Chinese or Japanese than in English. Just from personal anecdote, I feel that many English speakers learning Japanese that have trouble with reading comprehension have issues not because of the language itself, but because they try to study vocabulary as if it's a phonetic language, as many classes are taught that way - memorization focus is on how characters or words sound, rather than the meaning of the characters or radicals they're composed from. The situation may be worse with Chinese if it's as common as the author implies for students to still have trouble reading newspapers after 10 years of study.
- thedufer 12y agoI hadn't thought about the differences between how one goes about learning phonetically vs...whatever the optimal way of learning Chinese/Japanese would be called. At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought preconceptions from that experience. I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4 years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).