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Comment by T-R | Hacker News Reader

While what the author says is true, I feel like there's a hint of ethnocentrism - his complaints all (over)emphasize the use of the link between the pronunciation of a word and its written representation. Whenever the author discusses things like writing the word "president" or forgetting how to spell "tin can", implicit and unmentioned is that the hypothetical person knows the pronunciation of the word, and is attempting to translate it into writing, which, of course, is a natural thing for someone coming from a phonetic language to assume the importance of. Yes, more logographic languages like Chinese have a weaker link between pronunciation and written form, but this is a tradeoff, not simply bad design. One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean (or for that matter, just that it takes forever to say anything in English).

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> One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean

The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false.

Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it.

That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).

Familiarity with a character is a lot like familiarity with a latin root word in English - if you know most or all of the characters that compose a word, you can usually do a pretty good job guessing the meaning of it. Certainly there are exceptions (and there may be more in Chinese than Japanese, which I'm more familiar with, as Chinese uses non-phonetic characters explicitly), but I'd still argue that it's quite useful. In Korean, which has a phonetic alphabet (though based on the same characters), I can always sound out a word, but I'll often have no idea what it means, whereas in Japanese, often I can't read a word out loud, but I know exactly what it means. For every "uptight", there are a dozen 心電図 (心:heart + 電:electric + 図:map = electrocardiogram). It works with spoken language as well, though - often times I'll hear someone say a new word, and I'll ask "is this the right character/syllable breakdown?", and if it is, then I already know what it means.

Edit: To your point regarding English having both connection to meaning and pronunciation - that's definitely true, it's just not as immediately clear/visually identifiable, and not as dense. One could certainly argue that, if native speakers are having serious issues learning pronunciation in a language, then the language makes a poor tradeoff with density there.

That sounds good in theory, but you've largely missed my point - a language that worked the way you're describing Chinese would be significantly easier to read than, say, English. However, the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. What explains this apparent discrepancy?

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.

I 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).

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