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Can you read with the same fluency...? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nescafe Senior Member Japan Joined 5412 days ago 137 posts - 227 votes  | Message 25 of 61 24 March 2010 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am still learning. The meaning of reading to me is changing. So I can not say anything for sure, but, I have a point, which is mildly related to the topic but maybe peculiar to those who read both of alphabetical and idiogram (Chinese character) texts. I have noticed Asian languages and Western languages may be different when it comes to reading.
While reading a text of Chinese characters (Japanese or 100% Chinese) I do not pronounce each word in my mind. I just see them and the meanings of words come to me directly without sounds. However, while reading texts in alphabet (English, German or Esperanto), I have to pronouce each word with mind voice. I read it without sound. In other words, I undersand Chinese characetrs by seeing, and alphabetical Western words by reading. This difference is reflected in time I need to understand the contents of texts. I can quick seach on articles in Chinese character, pick up only what I want to know. On the other hand, for example when reanding an article in English Wikipedia, I have to read each word one after another, from top to bottom. I do not know whether it is because of my limited ability in English or the nature of letters. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6786 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 26 of 61 24 March 2010 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
This sounds like a superpower! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6946 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 27 of 61 24 March 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
I find parallel texts wholly incompatible with any kind of "flow" while reading, much more so than looking up an occasional word in a dictionary. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vb Octoglot Senior Member Afghanistan Joined 6425 days ago 112 posts - 135 votes Speaks: English, Romanian, French, Polish, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 28 of 61 24 March 2010 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, it's a 'parallel' text only in that there is an opportunity to compare the two renderings - the translation (which is literal) is interwoven with the original (ie. it appears alternately, below it), which makes it easier to flit between the two. It's not a facing-page non-literal translation that requires abrupt shifts in attention and often painful efforts to find points of correspondence. When benefiting from my patented super-heroic formatting method, I find it reasonably easy to distinguish between the target language and translation and then jump over the latter, once I'm getting up to speed. Edited by vb on 24 March 2010 at 9:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5841 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 29 of 61 24 March 2010 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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After 10 years in England I still read slower in English than in Swedish.
I can't skim through a text as fast as colleagues. I need to focus more. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5769 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 30 of 61 24 March 2010 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
As a learner of Japanese (and one with a chaotic learning style) I made the experience that when I still am in the progress of learning a word (be it chinese character, one-character word or compound word), I often either know what a word means, or how it is pronounced - but not both of it. The same is true for reading Chinese; only that then I also often don't know the Mandarin pronunciation but the Japanese one. What's most curious is that somehow, I find it really difficult to recognize words that I expect to be written in Chinese characters. Anyhow. When I read solely to find a certain piece of information, I first form a mental image of what I am searching for, and then look through the text like when I am searching for an item in the supermarket, ignoring everything that doesn't match with the search term. In this case, I take the word as picture, in any language/writing system. When I try to find the page where I stopped reading before, or when I try to gauge whether a text might be interesting/suit my needs, I tend to jump from paragraph to paragraph, taking in fragments of everything. I also don't subvocalize in this case. (I also have a normal reading mode with subvocalization, and an intensive reading mode I use for proofreading, translation or study, which uses both visual and vocal processing of the text.) I enjoy reading in English more than reading in German. Attention deficit problems, probably. For Spanish I still lack vocabulary, and for Japanese ... I don't even want to think about how much I need to learn before being able to read fluently and without ruby characters. And those are the good ones. )= 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5588 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 31 of 61 25 March 2010 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||
I highly doubt that. My friend has lived here for 5 years and reads with absolute fluency, never looking up a word. I'm pretty sure that you are more advanced than him :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5738 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 32 of 61 25 March 2010 at 1:13am | IP Logged | |||||
This just means you haven't read enough in these languages yet ;) Many people subvocalize even in their own languages, but most of us (at least those who read a lot) just see a word and instantly recognize it, without looking at the single letters. Have you seen these fun emails where, except for the first and the last letter, all the letters of a word are jumbled, and you (or us :) ) can still recognize the word? This sort-of proves that ;) And anyway, I'm reading so fast that I wouldn't even have time to "say" the words. So in summary: If you're still reading texts of another language letter by letter: Keep on reading, it'll get better :) If you're already reading well enough, but you're being held back by the habit of subvocalizing everything: There are some methods to stop doing that. I think I've seen people talk about it in this forum, otherwise ask google. BTW, funny side fact: I often find myself subvocalizing Chinese when I read it. Which is, at this stage, not a bad thing, I believe, since my spoken Chinese is really horrible ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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