Korean Reader For Chinese Characters

[Brook Mithani]

Chinesewas the first language that my daughter learned to read. She reads simplified Chinese characters fluently and also recognizes an unknown number of traditional Chinese characters without the aid of Pinyin or Zhuyin.

Since my Chinese language attrition is partly due to bullying and other painful childhood experiences, I have been determined to make Chinese learning positive for both of us. We have no need to learn Chinese, because English is compulsory in our community.

Learning Chinese has been challenging, but I am grateful for this second chance with my children. We are making special memories, and love is the magic ingredient. My children know that Chinese learning is difficult for mommy, but I try to set a positive example.

During those first lessons, she quizzed my daughter with many flashcards. Despite some success, my daughter was quickly resenting Chinese lessons and wanted nothing to do with flashcards. The Chinese flashcards had characters and images on opposite sides.

Previously, lessons were fun and filled with music, stickers, and crafts. My daughter was understandably upset that lesson expectations changed, resulting in an unfortunate aversion to Korean learning.

Although we had a good friendship with the teacher, I regret not asking her to hold off on reading and instead to focus on creating positive associations with the language. I trusted her as the language expert since I know very little about the language.

Similarly, although traditional Chinese characters and simplified Chinese characters are related and knowing one script will help the other, you still need frequent exposure to the actual character to know what it is.

Instead, she had asked me to print out lyrics to her favorite praise music so that she could practice reading and writing the characters, but I put it off because I had already planned the other activity.

Chinese leveled readers are designated specifically to teach at least a few hundred of common Chinese characters, but the content and illustrations are often not as interesting as regular picture books.

Dr. Betty Choi is a Harvard-trained pediatrician and mother on a mission to connect families through language and play. Chalk Academy was inspired by her trials and triumphs with relearning a heritage language and raising bilingual children in a monolingual community. Dr. Choi's advice has been featured in PBS, Parents, Healthline, The Atlantic, and VeryWell.

Hello,

Thank you for sharing your experience. Obviously, this has been a great experience for you and your daughter, which is terrific. It seems to be working well for you and that is very inspiring.

Kids are really incredible learners, even without such dedicated teaching, though some of us are a bit like your son who hates tracing (I carried that with me for a good 20 years). You might be grateful to find that we live in an age of computers where he can get away with it once he needs to write!

Thank you for sharing this! I can very much relate with your journey. I am a third generation Chinese-Filipino, living in the Philippines, and it was a struggle to learn Chinese when I was growing up. I finally realized its importance now that I have kids of my own. What you shared inspired me to be more vigilant and intentional in teaching characters!

HI Betty! I received my orders from Odonata today! I am so happy these arrived neatly and not wet from our unpredictable weather here in Melbourne. I would like to ask from where you had the above Chinese character map printed off? Is this vista print? I found this but I am not used to this font- -write/traditional/index.php?page=1. I prefer the handwritten-like font I saw in the first picture with your Lao-Da here, where she stick stickers on some characters. Can I please ask to have a copy of this from you?

"Reading" means a number of different things, a problem that needs to be be addressed before questions of Hangul vs. English can be addressed. At the most basic level, it refers to the ability to perceive written material and articulate its content. To even talk about a "rate", you have to settle on comparable units. There are no comparable units for perception of written language that can be applied to English and Chinese or Korean. You might count segmental phonemes (if we could agree on the phonemic analysis of the languages, which we cannot), or you count count syllables (if we could agree on the number of syllables in certain words of English, which we cannot). Invoking stress feet would be a better measure for English, but not Chinese or Korean. The count of words would favor English, unless you redefine "word" so that various grammatical words of English are deemed to be part of some other word. Korean words are generally longer than English words. Chinese words are segmentally and syllabically shorter than English words, on average, but Chinese syllables are durationally longer than English syllables, so it matters very much what thing you are measuring. Actually, Hangul and Chinese do not have roughly one character per syllable, since Hangul is more a syllable-structures alphabetic system, see for example [pap] 밥 "rice" with the same-ish character in the northwest and bottom positions and "a" to the Northeast. Chinese 休 and 湖 can be treated as respectively 1 character or 2, or 1 or 3, depending on how you count.

The authors don't take into consideration a well-known cultural difference regarding speed-reading and comprehension, which is that experiential background with timed read-and-respond tests (e.g. the GRE) improves performance on these exams. Certain international students have little experience with these types of tests, while others have substantial experience. This is a further variable, one not controlled for, that can influence reading speed and comprehension, in a way that is not related to language.

Apparently Korean is slower to read than English, according to this study: Korean reading speed: Effects of print size and retinal eccentricity (the main conclusions are in the abstract). They gave 713wpm for Korean, and 787wpm for English. However, as the other answer states, it is difficult to compare across languages. How much meaning does a "word" carry?

There is another study that looked at the information density, or how many "bits" of information there were per syllable. This varied widely between languages (from 5 to 10 bits / syllable) source. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a study that links the two. However, the second study does show that Korean generally contains less information per syllable than English, so since Korean reads slower, and syllables generally contain less information, I would wager the answer is no.

Without diving too deeply into the study in OP--which seems like it would suffer from lots of problems involving comparing "reading speed" using translated and (the author's protestations notwithstanding) non-identical texts, comparing between different people with different backgrounds, strategies, and purposes--it's possible to answer this question from an entirely Korean standpoint, as Korean actually used to use Chinese characters quite a bit. It's much less common today, but as recently as the 1920s political newspaper articles were written at least half in hanja, which were part of the full school curriculum through the 1960s (and are still taught in middle/high school).

Wikipedia cites this source--a general text on the psychology of reading--which in turn cites studies that show 1956 readers read mixed hanja-hangul texts more rapidly than the same texts written purely in hangul; but by 1977, the purely hangul texts were read faster.

Objections could still be made to this comparison, because the two studies were carried out with different participants on different texts. But the different results indicate that there is no universal reading speed advantage between Chinese characters and hangul; and instead suggest that even within a particular language, the individual's experience/comfort with the script is more important than any intrinsic property of the script.

Can Chinese readers scan large amounts of text faster/more accurately than their alphabet-using counterparts?So if we placed a native Chinese speaker next to a native English speaker having the same education and literacy levels and gave them both a text of the same length and complexity in their respective languages, would one of them a) finish faster? b)comprehend more accurately? c)better retain read information?

Findings indicate that the Chinese readers (24.7 minutes) are faster than the English readers (26.6 minutes) by about 2 minutes on the same reading material.

L and Zhang, Reading efficiency: A comparative study of English and Chinese orthographies, Reading Research and Instruction, 2010

Adding a point to bytebuster's answer: from my own experience, "trackback cost" is another major factor. During fast scanning it is common that I need to go back a few words/characters to get the context or resolve ambiguity. In English, in most cases going back one word or two is not sufficient, I need to go further back or even reread the whole sentence which is much more expensive than in Chinese I only need to look back a few characters and with square characters my eyes can locate them quickly.

I remember there's a research about different ways of processing written information between Chinese and English speakers. Chinese readers have active spots in a part of the brain that deals with pictures, while a different place in the brains of English-speaking readers is responsible for reading. It might be possible that Chinese recognize all the characters on a page as a whole picture.

Senseless question. You wouldn't acknowledge, but you scan 'images', too when reading English. You never read a word letter-by-letter, unless you encounter something that is not familiar to you, foreign names, etc.

In my experience, the speed of reading Chinese and reading English are just not comparable. I can read a long paragraph written in Chinese at a single glance, and get almost all the essential meaning. Also, I could scan and locate the information I need in a hell long article almost instantly, provided it must be written in Chinese. I am trying to find a way that can make me achieve this in reading English articles, especially huge amount of academic content. I can now apply some rapid reading tricks to reading English stuff, but still cannot read a whole page at once, which seems to be natural when I am reading Chinese content.

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