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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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This is slightly off-topic, but I think it's worth noting that most other languages don't have as much of a problem with this.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

There is also some reason to think that syllabaries are usually better than alphabets for learning languages, despite the larger character set required. Syllables are a more natural unit of speech, and so there isn't the whole process of learning to deconstruct a syllable into or assemble a syllable from its constituent sounds that one has to go through to get accustomed to the use of an alphabet.

This paper was really interesting.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system

Any data to back that up? I had much easier time to learn to read Hebrew writing (or Georgian writing) than, for example, Japanese kanas, and kanji still looks to me like a hopeless task. Learning English reading, after having Cyrillic, didn't even register as a problem (of course, you can't ever completely learn English spelling anyway, because there are no rules). I didn't try Hangul but I'd estimate it'd be about as hard as Japanese ones. I'm not talking about learning the language of course, just making it from writing to sounds.

I'm not especially knowledgeable about these scripts—I haven't learned to read them myself—but I believe Hangul is an alphabet, not a syllabary (well, an alphabet organized into blocks which are syllables). The second paper I linked to says that English takes about 3 years to learn to read, as opposed to 1 year in more regular orthographies. The paper it links to in order to support that also thinks that syllabic complexity might be a factor, in addition to orthographic complexity, so that gap is not necessarily just due to irregular and complicated spelling. It's only in reference to European languages, but I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to other orthographies.

I haven't really looked properly into language learning with syllabaries, but my instinct would be that if you already know how to use an alphabet, an alphabet would be easier, because of the lower amount of memorization, and maybe whether you already are familiar with the spoken language might matter too.

I think the cost to an alphabet comes in learning how to turn a word into phonemes, and vice versa. In English, and most languages, a "t" never stands on its own, but is always part of some syllable with a vowel (wikipedia (and I would assume this is a normal analysis) breaks syllables into an onset, a nucleus, and a coda—the onset and coda don't stand on their own.). So when we see a "t" in a block of text, we don't pronounce that sound separately, but have to figure out how to attach it to the surrounding sounds. Syllabaries don't have to worry about that whole process of learning to deal with text like that. Going from "duh" "aw" guh" to "dog" is nontrivial. But if you already know how to do all that, you've figured it out, then that will carry over to other scripts and languages, because there's no real difference in the skill, and so the number of things to remember ends up playing a larger factor, relatively speaking, in learning to read it. Or at least, that's how I model it, this whole thing is my own thoughts as to why that might be the case, not something I've sourced from someone experienced.

But in any case, the first paper lists evidence that syllabaries are better for teaching people how to read, for example, "Asfaha et al. found that first graders learned to read the non-alphabetic Ge'ez far more easily than the alphabetic scripts in spite of the larger number of signs."

I'm just guessing here, but it might also be the case that some languages could be more or less suited for syllabaries. If all, or most, syllables in a language are (C)V, that would reduce the number of combinations needed.

I've no data, but I've talked to a couple Westerners mention finding hangul very easy to learn, including 1 who managed to learn to read it (not fluently but competently) over a single weekend, despite having no exposure to non-Latin alphabet before. The complete lack of ambiguity in the mappings between letters and sounds lends itself to being pretty easy to learn. Hangul is generally taught as having 24 letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels - which is less than the 26 in English, though in actuality there are more vowels due to combinations of vowels being their own things (e.g. "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" are 2 of the 10 vowels, but "ㅐ" is not, and it's NOT pronounced the same as if you just put "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" together). I think the fact that each "chunk" in hangul correlates exactly to 1 syllable might also help, because it makes for a natural mapping between the number of "chunks" you see on the page and the number of syllables you pronounce, versus English where those boundaries between syllables aren't obvious.

No, Hangul and Japanese, despite some superficial similarities to the Western eye, are entirely different and at opposite ends of the difficulty spectrum.

OK looks like I need to learn to read Hangul then, if it's so easy.

If you already know spoken Korean it should be no problem. Learning the syllabary isn't the same as learning the language, though.

Yes, I know. I just like being able to read stuff even if I not always know what it means :)

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

Sure, Hangul is easy. But I bet it's taught as it's designed -- this subcharacter means this sound, this other subcharacter means another sound. They're probably not teaching "whole syllable" (i.e. 김 is Kim, 문 is Moon, etc) nor "whole word" (서울 is Seoul, 학교 is school, 핵무기 is nuke, etc). That would be crazy, ignoring all the design features of the syllabary. The Latin alphabet is older, more irregular when used for English, and more evolved than designed by now, but it's still crazy to ignore it.

I hadn't meant to bring up Hangul as an example of a syllabary, just of regular spelling (I was originally going to put Spanish, but then remembered that I had seen someone mention Hangul, so I figured I may as well acknowledge that instead).

Although, after looking on google scholar a little (and only a little—I'm sure there's a lot more to read) the abstract here seems to suggest that they usually don't process it letter by letter?

This article by the same author, says that children are usually taught using "a CV chart of possible syllables" with children learning syllables (well, leaving off the coda, so not quite whole syllables) before they learn to recognize the alphabet, so it looks like they actually do think of them more like syllables? This is a little surprising to me.

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