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Learning a script | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 17 25 August 2008 at 4:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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The "Common script for all languages thread" has been diverging into "what does it mean to learn a script", and the original poster has asked for this to stop, so I've decided to start a new thread on what it means to learn a script.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 17 25 August 2008 at 4:49am | IP Logged | |||||
To me, this is not a matter of learning the script, although it is intimately tied to it, for the simple reason that languages are not phonetic. For some, like Russian, Polish, Italian, and Spanish, what you said is a usable definition. For others, like French or English, I don't think it is. If I read a passage in a non-phonetic language written with the Latin script, mangling the pronunciation horribly, there's a problem - but it's not that I don't know the script. Similarly, if I hear something, I may well not even be able to parse it into words for a 'blurred together' language (French or Russian come to mind, though I no longer have this problem often with them), much less write it accurately; again, this isn't necessarily a script problem. Even for relatively phonetic languages, there is a similar problem: my original attempts to pronounce Dutch, almost exactly 2 years ago, reading it as if it were English, were literally incomprehensible. It doesn't follow that I don't know the Latin alphabet. I suppose that you could argue, in this case, that knowing the 'script' means knowing the regular pronunciation rules, even if they differ from another language you already are familiar with using the same characters; I don't consider this to have a clearcut answer. I'll stumble reading a new language written with the Latin script, unless I have no idea about it whatsoever (in which case, I'll read it like English or whatever language it reminds me of most). Hence, I consider it reasonable to say that I've "learned" Cyrillic, but would still stumble reading a long passage of it out loud. For languages like Chinese: if I write an entirely incorrect character, except for the pronunciation, in response to what I hear, what are the implications for how well I know the script? How does this differ from spelling an unphonetic French word phonetically? Similarly, if I misread a Chinese character or unphonetic French word - while understanding the meaning - this is clearly an error, but how much is it an error tied to the script? At what point is it a problem of semantics, understanding, and memorizing irregularities which aren't encoded into the script itself, rather than 'merely' matters of knowing the script?
I agree that doing flashcards is insufficient to consider a script 'learned'. I'll reserve judgment on whether typing it is. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| abigail Newbie India Joined 5941 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 3 of 17 27 August 2008 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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Generally learning languages or anything is like an art.Try to think how an sculptor carving an statue, the time and the patience he takes.. thats how we can learn a particular language..it will be more useful to learn more languages..
---------------------------- abigail Edited by abigail on 27 August 2008 at 1:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6019 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 17 27 August 2008 at 4:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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An experiment for you: take a short passage of text (say half a page of paperback in a Latin-script language that you don't know. Time yourself as you copy it out.
Take a sentence of similar length in a language you don't know, with a script you're not familiar with. Time yourself as you copy it. The times will be veeeeeeery different. We forget how complicated writing is because it gets so easy with practise. Letters are not just simple shapes like triangles and squares. In order to write legibly you have to internalise these shapes, so I don't reckon you've learnt a script until you can write it by hand, so that's how I would start to learn a foreign script. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6785 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 17 27 August 2008 at 4:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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There are people who say they learned hiragana and katakana (Japanese phonetic scripts) in a couple of hours each or a couple of days. I know that their knowledge was not deep enough to consider the scripts as mastered. But I guess if they were to then continue to use the scripts everyday thereafter, then they might not experience forgetting what they learned.
Stumbling on pronunciation or writing of difficult scripts is not enough to say that the person does not know the script. I have passed one of the levels of the Japanese language proficiency test, but I cannot pickup a book a read everything written in Japanese. This is a vocabulary problem not a problem with my knowledge of the script. I do not know every word in Japanese. I think for scripts that are alphabetic, if you can make a reasonable attempt at reading the script in a manner that is sufficient enough to show that you have learned it, then that is enough to say that you know the script. If when you read it, you sound like you've never studied it and have no idea what you are saying, then it will be obvious. If you forget the pronunciation of one or two characters that is ok. But if you can't read 20 percent of them, then you still haven't learned it. But at least you could demonstrate that you are learning it. Edited by Keith on 27 August 2008 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6095 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 17 27 August 2008 at 11:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can read and write Cyrillic as easily as the Roman script...I started Russian about a year ago, but I was functional with the script after about 3 weeks, and proficient after about 3-4 months. It's definitely something that you can master, but it's important that you get a lot of exposure and practice. I'm really good with the standard typed Cyrillic, and I can write fluently in cursive, but trying to read cursive or some of the different fonts can be kind of difficult.
By the way, something really cool/interesting is that whenever I start thinking in Russian, my mind is also forced over to Cyrillic. So, if I'm on the computer and start thinking of a Russian word, I'll start hitting the keys as though I'm using a Russian keyboard. Edited by chelovek on 27 August 2008 at 11:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ' Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5948 days ago 120 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian* | Message 7 of 17 27 August 2008 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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* * *
Disclamer: I didn't read the original thread. * * *
I can read and write Cyrillic, but not fast, nor necessarily account for the litte glitches (ogo being pronounced ava) and my Greek is just as good reading/writing as Latin. I'd say to really "learn a script" you'd have to learn all the components and be able to identify, use, and differenciate between them. You'd not even need to know their pronounciations (cf. dead languages like Egyptian). Scripts are means by which words are encoded, they also indicate (usually imperfectly) the pronounciation of a word. The Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are widely used. In many languages they sound different. If I see a Polish word, often I'd not even try and pronounce it. But I can look it up, because I can recognise the letters and diacritics, thus I have in fact mastered the Latin script. Same with Cyrillic. Given Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, or Russian text, I can write down the text in Cyrillic, and later find those characters effectively. I'd also be able to guess the pronounciation, but why they have those superfluous ь and Ь characters at the end of words I have no idea. The point is, people seem to focus on the speech aspect of scripts. Learning a script just means learning a set of symbols with which a language is encoded. For the application of a script to any given language, it would mean learning the sounds, clusters, special categorisaion of characters (which may later help with mutation) and so on. But then you're not talking about the Latin script anymore. Rather it's The German language's Latin-based script 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 17 27 August 2008 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well-said. By the way: the Ьь/Ъъ characters are also known as the 'soft sign' and 'hard sign'; they indicate whether the preceding letter is palatalized or not, respectively. They're not superfluous; if there isn't a vowel following the last consonant (since different letters are used for vowels that palatalize the preceding consonant and vowels that don't), the word is ambiguous without it; beyond that, there are various language-specific roles and historical spellings. The ъ is assumed at the end of a word ending in a consonant in modern Russian spelling, which leaves ь to be explicitly marked. Digging into history, it was actually a reduced vowel once upon a time, but it dried up and blew away, leaving only its ashes in the form of ъ. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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