Harmon Seaver wrote:

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 06:17:34PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote:

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On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:

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The Japanese actually have three written languages -- hiragana, katakana and kanji -- and everybody pretty much uses them all, often at the same time.

These aren't languages. The first two are alphabets - or rather syllabaries. They go "ka ki ku ke ko ...", that is, there is a character

Ah yes, you're right, I mispoke. Alphabets, scripts, whatever, it is pretty amazing. US kids have enough trouble learning to read in one alphabet.

Aha, Zee Freudian Slip! Just as you confused translation and transliteration before! You obvuiously have some deep psychological confounding of language with the representation of language! <psychobabbler exits stage left> Japanese literacy rates are higher than ours, even thought hey have such an apparently complex set of scripts. Every now and again one reads reports of a "dyslexic" English speaker who learns Chinese or Japanese and finds them easier than English. There was at least one man who went to Japan with his parents when he was in his teens, almost unable to read English, learned to read Kanji, and then then found himself able to read in English. I suspect that there is more than one strategy used by learning readers and that most people find alphabets (or syllabaries) simpler to get to grips with but some, for whatever reason, find Chinese-style symbols simpler. Japanese of course uses both so maybe it is possible for someone who finds one system harder than the other to get a boost by concentrating on the other. I don't know, as I know no language other than English. Skilled readers of English *don't* sound out the letters of familiar words in their heads. We recognise words and syllables by their shape, treating each word as if it was a Chinese character. Phonetic approaches are only used for unfamiliar or foreign words. Maybe there is some reason why that "dyslexic" man didn't make the jump from reading letters to reading whole words in English, but once Kanji had got him used to the idea he could transfer it back. When I was a kid the fashion in teaching to read was the "look and say" method - the teacher held up flash cards with pictures and got the kids to say the word. There was no attempt made to start with phonetics or even the alphabet. Today the fashion has swung back the other way. Interesting aside - ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are actually written in a very similar style to Japanese, mixing up a proto-alphabet and a syllabary (based on the first sound of the name of the object depicted) with "determinatives", heiroglyphs which represent the whole word. If we wrote English like that (which we sometimes do in kid's puzzles) the name "Harmon Seaver" might be written as pictures of a wound, something lying on a table, waves of the sea, a violet, an eagle, a rabbit, and a picture of a man sitting down as the determinative. I wouldn't want to say how we'd write "Jim Dixon" except that if you look at a grammar or dictionary of Ancient Egyptian some of those hieroglyphs were pretty explicit.