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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Is it this one? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/

Also, this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/ (1997! That's how old this war is!)

In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. Phonics theory takes exactly the opposite position: the proper analogy for learning to read is learning music notation, or Morse code, or Braille, in which mastery of a set of symbols comes first.

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Yes, this is one thing I noticed living in China and comparing strings. When you look at English in terms of phonemes rather than characters, it's just as impressive that people learn to read in English-speaking countries as in China.

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