Well, it should be pointed out that learning to read Chinese is not so unlike learning to read phonetic languages as one might think. Remember first of all that Chinese does not have "2,000 letters". Each of the characters is a word, or in some cases two or three characters form a word. Each character is also made up after an assembly of "radicals", or basic building blocks (actually, only one of the sub-characters is referred to as 'the' radical, and that's how they look up a character in a Chinese dictionary). And remember that when learning to read, being able to pronounce the word based on its letters does little for you (when you're small) unless you know the meaning of that word. So young Enlglish readers have to learn word-by-word just like young Chinese readers. The english readers get some help by being able to sound out the word, but the Chinese reader can possibly pick out the radical and get something of a hint. That said, it IS harder learning to read and write in Chinese, and this is why Beijing has indicated its desire to put away the characters one day. (But that will never happen.) The reading ramp-up curves occur fairly similarly in east and west, from what I've been able to tell, but the western curve seems to move towards an asymptote in HS while Chinese seems to remain linear up through part of college. -TD

From: "Trei, Peter" <ptrei@rsasecurity.com> To: Steve Furlong <sfurlong@acmenet.net>, "'Jim Dixon'" <jdd@dixons.org> CC: cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: RE: 'Peking' vs 'Beijing' Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 13:52:50 -0400

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Jim Dixon[SMTP:jdd@dixons.org]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Steve Furlong wrote:

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The cost of this cross-language literacy is years in school spent memorizing a few thousand characters to develop basic literacy. Oriental schools typically emphasize memorize-drill-repeat, with individuality and inventiveness discouraged. Surely a part of that emphasis comes from the needs of learning their atrocious written language. The cost is too high.

I don't think that anyone who has learned to read and write one of the languages based on Chinese characters would agree that they are "atrocious". If your native language is written using a western alphabet, characters are hard to learn. But once learned, they are conveniently concise.

What I'd be curious to know is at what age an average person's reading ability catches up with their speaking ability, in the different systems.

In English, children are usually equally fluent in the written and spoken forms by the age of 8, and often earlier. At that point, they've essentially

mastered written language, and further progess depends mainly on the rate with which they acquire spoken volcabulary, grammar, and context. (The main drag is English's highly irregular spelling, which effects writing ability much more than reading. More regular languages such as Italian do not have this problem - there are no spelling bees in Italy as they would be pointless.)

By the time an average American child is 9, they can read and the newspaper without any difficulty. Can an average Chinese or Japanese child do this?

While I wouldn't use the word 'atrocious', I think a case can be made that the fewer years required to master literacy, the more time available for other learning.

I'm told the Korean Hangul is even better than Western alphabetic systems - only 24 characters are in use, and it's not unusual for children of 2 or 3 to read and write.

See: http://www.sigmainstitute.com/koreanonline/hangul_history.shtml

Peter Trei

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