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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 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'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.

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