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Comment by tgb | Hacker News Reader

I'm learning Chinese and I think you've avoided the question. The crux of the matter is how to learn the thousands of character-to-pinyin/meanings mappings. It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character. And the way I'm learning is straight memorization which this article makes sounds bad, but what's the alternative in Chinese?

And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.

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I think the idea is to use Pinyin to bootstrap knowledge of hanzi.

A) This would allow you to use written language to teach hanzi and

B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin.

I'm not sure how it actually works in Chinese, but as a adult second language learner of Japanese, having a phonetic system I can use to transcribe the logoriphic system is quite helpful.

> B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin.

Indeed. Here's a page from a textbook for second-graders: https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg

It's a story teaching the meaning of the proverb 揠苗助长 (pulling sprouts to help them grow). Some of the characters are annotated with their pinyin above, e.g. 揠 yà or 筋疲 jīn pí. This text in particular is a bit weird in that it only uses 揠 yà in the title and replaces it with 拔 bá in the story, so the reader would have to infer that 揠 yà and 拔 bá are synonyms. I think 拔苗助长 is actually the more common way to write the proverb.

> It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character.

You are wrong, it absolutely does. 放方芳房肪舫防紡 are all pronounced fang and contains 方. This stems from the evolution of the script, where a character was used to write various words with the same or close pronunciation. Then those characters where extended with other parts to reduce polysemy. This is similar the determiner of other logographic scripts (hieroglyphic, cuneiform) except the determiner is embedded in the character themselves instead of being separate ones.

While this phenomenon is less reguglar than in an alphabetic script (not that English has a straight graphemes/phonemes mapping either...) because of the script evolution , it’s happening nonetheless and is quite useful. So it’s not true to say that you can’t guess the sound of a character, because in a lot of case it’s possible to get an approximation.

Not sure why you're downvoted. You're absolutely right.

I'm only a year into learning Chinese, but I can often guess the sound of a new character just by recalling components of similar characters. The tone takes memorization, but the sound oftentimes has hints. Especially if it's a complex, uncommon character--almost always the sound derives from one of the common radicals it uses.

It's not as intuitive as, say, pinyin, but it's helpful and straight up taught by any decent Chinese textbook.

I do this guessing while trying to read an unknown charger but this article made me question the usefulness of that and is exactly why I'm unsure what the process in Chinese should be. Doing this looks more like the cueing process of picking a word with the right starting letter that matches the rest of the sentence and moving on. I certainly don't learn the word by seeing it a couple times in text.

> this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.

This tracks with some self reports for the most advanced L2 language learners though, that your ability to learn new words itself improves while you are learning new words. Maybe just requires a ton of exposure.

MattVsJapan talks about drilling vocab early on, then once he hit a certain level, he could often just look up a new word once and know it almost indefinitely, more like with English.

2nd grade is, what, 8 years of immersion? Exposure to something like 100-250,000 sentences, with practice or exposure for all available hours every day? It's a lot to catch up to.

Even so, with 2nd graders, we're not talking like "perspicacity" or "abrogate." Some words and some concepts will be harder than others.

Wait, did I misread the article?

I thought it said that memorization is good?

> Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

> It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.

I thought this means people recognize the entire word, rather than the letters of the word. Just like how you recognize a Chinese character.

Then you learn to map the Chinese character with the pronunciation.

The article claims that bad readers memorize a handful of high frequency words and rely on those. I read the parts you quote as saying that those words are not memorized as a chunk and I don't see how a similar process can be done on Chinese characters. I kind of doubt that they are read by decomposing into radicals.

I think if you can learn one per hour every day you'll be doing pretty well. If you're in school you can easily learn a few every week.

It's also not rote memorization, rote memorization is mapping text->text not text->meaning.

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