Learning to read a non alphabetic script - chinese

Learning to Read a Non-alphabetic Script - Chinese Or: “I have to learn how many characters?”... Basics of Chinese CharactersRepresent a single syllable in the spoken language Usually

Learning to Read a

Non-alphabetic Script -

Chinese

Or: “I have to learn how many

characters?”

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

Character Construction: 6

Methods

Pictographs

Pictographs 象形 ： ： character is a picture

of what it represents 日 for sun and 月 for moon These were the first characters but

they make up a small total of the currently

used ones

Indicative

Indicative 指事 ： ： character indicates by its shape what it means, e.g 二 means two, 上 means “up” and 下 means “down”

Character Construction (2)

Associative

Associative 会意 : Components combine

meanings into a new character, e.g “sun” and

“moon” combine to 明 “ bright” “

Phonograms

Phonograms 形 ：声 : 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 木 (wood) + 每 (mei) = 梅 (plum, mei)

Character Construction (3)

Meaning Expansion

Meaning Expansion 转注 : A

character’s original meaning gets

expanded

Phonetic Borrowing

Phonetic Borrowing 假借 : A

character is used for another word with the same meaning, e.g 萬 was

originally “scorpion” but now “10,000”

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

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

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

Learning to Read English

Four 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 patterns…become multi-letter units such as onsets and rimes”

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)

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

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.

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

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

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