Learning to Read a Nonalphabetic Script Chinese

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Learning to Read a Non-alphabetic Script - Chinese

• Or I have to learn how many characters?

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Basics of Chinese Characters

• Represent a single syllable in the spoken
  language
• Usually a single morpheme, except for some
  foreign loan words
• Give some but not reliable phonetic information
• Often composed of other components See next
  slides
• Total up to 50,000, but average educated Chinese
  reader knows 3,500 to 5,000

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Character Construction 6 Methods

• Pictographs ?? character is a picture of what it
  represents ? for sun and ? for moon. These were
  the first characters but they make up a small
  total of the currently used ones
• Indicative ?? character indicates by its shape
  what it means, e.g. ? means two, ? means up and
  ? means down

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Character Construction (2)

• Associative ?? Components combine meanings into
  a new character, e.g. sun and moon combine to
  ? bright
• Phonograms ?? One component (phonetic)
  contributes the sound, the other (signific) the
  meaning. The most common class of characters,
  totaling 85 of those in use. E.g. ? (wood) ?
  (mei) ? (plum, mei)

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Character Construction (3)

• Meaning Expansion ?? A characters original
  meaning gets expanded
• Phonetic Borrowing ?? A character is used for
  another word with the same meaning, e.g. ? was
  originally scorpion but now 10,000

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(No Transcript)
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Some Myths

• Chinese characters are a universal writing system
• Chinese characters are ideographs (represent
  meaning directly)
• Chinese characters are actually morpho-syllabic
  and still largely phonologically based

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Differences between English and Chinese

• English letters correspond to phonemes while
  sinographs correspond to syllables and morphemes
• Letters have a far fewer visually distinctive
  features than sinographs
• Chinese morphemes are almost always monosyllabic,
  English allows more variety
• Chinese words are often two or more morphemes,
  with no word boundaries indicated
• Chinese uses many more graphic units

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Learning to Read Chinese (Van and Zian, 1962)

• Starts with learning to read characters
• Three stages
• Relate sound/meaning to global shape of character
• Associate sound/meaning with parts of characters,
  often confusing parts with similar shapes
• Associate sound/meaning with actual character
  strokes

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Learning to Read EnglishFour Phases (Ehri, 1992)

• Pre-alphabetic use visual clues with word and
  in word
• Partial alphabetic readers use some of the
  component letters of words and their sounds
• Full alphabetic Children can relate letters to
  the sounds they produce (grapheme-phoneme
  correspondence)
• Consolidated alphabetic With repeated
  exposure, particular letter patternsbecome
  multi-letter units such as onsets and rimes

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Comparison

• Similarities
• Learning both orthographies starts with
  associating oral word with print stimulus
• Learning is through paired associations with
  various visual clues
• Children then analyze words into their components
  (letters or radicals)

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Comparison

• Differences
• Phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later
  English reading skills, but not in Chinese
• Knowledge of general information and verbal
  memory is a good predictor of ability to read
  Chinese and Japanese
• Differences appear to be related to the
  differences in orthography

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An Owed to the Spelling Checker I have a
spelling checker It came with my PC It plane lee
marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot
sea. Eye ran this poem threw it, Your sure reel
glad two no. Its vary polished in it's weigh, My
checker tolled me sew.
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Learnability of English and Chinese

• Is it harder to learn Chinese than English?
• It would seem so, since Chinese readers have to
  learn so many characters
• But that would indicate there should be more
  reading disabled Chinese and that they should be
  behind their English-reading equivalents
• But a study has shown this to be untrue

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Learnability (2)

• How can reading levels be similar across
  languages?
• Perhaps the orthographies really are well suited
  for the languages
• Each orthography has its advantages and
  disadvantages that balance each other out
• Perhaps switching to an alphabetic system in
  China would bring its own problems

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A Note on Romanizations

• Various attempts have been made to represent
  Chinese in an alphabetic script
• Difficult because of tones and large number of
  morphemes
• Some systems include
• Pinyin uses Latin letters, tones indicated by
  diacritics on top of vowel but easily left off
• Guoyeu Romatzyh Also uses Latin alphabet, but
  tones represented in spelling