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Can you "read" by a glance?

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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
31 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
Kevin Hsu
Triglot
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Canada
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Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Korean
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 Message 25 of 31
13 January 2012 at 5:51am | IP Logged 
My English is more fluent(in all areas) than my Mandarin. However, I catch a lot more in
a glance in Mandarin than I do with English. I think it has a lot to do with the
compactness of written Chinese.
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smallwhite
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 Message 26 of 31
13 January 2012 at 7:56am | IP Logged 
If English speakers really "read" by recognising shapes of words, then does that mean:
- READING CAPITALISED TEXT IS VERY HARD
- Reading Title Case Is Very Hard
- REaDInG wEIrdLY CApiTAlisED TExt is simply impossible
- reading other people's handwriting is hard even when it's legible
- reading fancy but legible fonts are hard
?

For me, no. I read CAPITALISED text fine even though as a non-native there must be a lot of words that I have never seen CAPITALISED. ie, even if it's my first time seeing those words CAPITALISED I still read them fine. But I'm not a native so maybe I read differently (and better???! Can't be.) Makes me wonder whether English natives really read by shape?
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Iversen
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 Message 27 of 31
13 January 2012 at 10:12am | IP Logged 
To my mind it is misleading to say that people read words by shape - even if their native language is English, where the amount of information in endings is minimal. They rather read by inference from fragmentary data, and shape can be a factor here, but if I remember the references to the actual experiments correctly the first and the last letters were the most important internal clues in a word, but the external context was at least as important.   
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Sandman
Diglot
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United States
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 Message 28 of 31
14 January 2012 at 9:41am | IP Logged 
egill wrote:
Sandman wrote:
1,946,822

vs.

One million, nine hundred and fourty-six thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two.



Yes, because a positional symbolic number system is the exact same thing as Chinese
characters. Exactly.


It's a useful analogy if you wish to bother to think about it.

Maybe this one's easier for you:

tree tree tree tree tree tree tree tree mountain mountain

vs

木木木木木木木木山山

On another, not unrelated note, one thing I definitely notice when I read Japanese is I seem to sub-vocalize far less than when reading English. With English even when doing reading quickly we still tend to "pronounce" things in our head as we go along. With Japanese, particularly with non-kana characters there's no need to (and a lot of the time I've forgotten how to pronounce it anyway, but still know perfectly well what it means). At times Japanese is like quickly glancing over scenery rather than looking over that same scenery and sub-vocalizing "mountain", "stream", "trees" as you go along. I don't know if that speeds things up much once you start combining many characters, grammatical elements, and ideas together, but it really is a different experience "reading" things you don't need to, and maybe even can't, pronounce in your head. For those of you that haven't studied any Chinese characters the example above hopefully illustrates it to some degree. I would dare anyone to read the "tree" line without sub-vocalizing in English to some degree ... good luck. The 木 line though probably involved very little or no sub-vocalizing (if that's possible) and without having the slightest clue the things are pronounced as "ki" or "yama" it can still be read just fine.

Sure, you may be able to quickly recognize the English "shape" of the word for tree or mountain or pick out the couple important letters, but it's still not quite the same thing. I don't know to what degree it's a sub-vocalization issue or just a compactness of information issue, but it's different, particularly with nouns.

Edited by Sandman on 14 January 2012 at 11:31am

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fiziwig
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 Message 29 of 31
14 January 2012 at 6:09pm | IP Logged 
So for those who can read Chinese at a glance, can you flip open the dictionary and look up an unfamiliar word at a glance? I have a collection of dictionaries in various languages that I don't know, so I tried an experiment. I went to an Italian web site and picked a word at random and looked it up in my paperback Italian dictionary. I repeated this half a dozen times, and then repeated the whole experiment with a Tagalog web site and a Tagalog paperback dictionary. These are two languages I know nothing about, and it took me an average of just under five seconds to locate an unfamiliar word in an unfamiliar language in a hardcopy dictionary.

Now how long would that feat take with a Chinese dictionary?

Since we are beings with finite lifetimes it is necessary to amortize the whole cost of Chinese compactness. How long does it take a non-native to learn Chinese well enough to read at a glance? and how long does it take a learner to look up an unfamiliar word? and how long does it take a learning writer to figure out how to "spell" a word he has spoken but never written?

To what extent is the speed and compactness advantage out weighed by the many disadvantages of a non-alphabetic system?
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IronFist
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United States
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 Message 30 of 31
14 January 2012 at 10:09pm | IP Logged 
smallwhite wrote:
If English speakers really "read" by recognising shapes of words, then does that mean:
- READING CAPITALISED TEXT IS VERY HARD
- Reading Title Case Is Very Hard
- REaDInG wEIrdLY CApiTAlisED TExt is simply impossible
- reading other people's handwriting is hard even when it's legible
- reading fancy but legible fonts are hard
?

For me, no. I read CAPITALISED text fine even though as a non-native there must be a lot of words that I have never seen CAPITALISED. ie, even if it's my first time seeing those words CAPITALISED I still read them fine. But I'm not a native so maybe I read differently (and better???! Can't be.) Makes me wonder whether English natives really read by shape?


Reading all caps at a distance is harder than reading lower case at a distance, assuming the distance is such that you can't clearly see each letter but can make out the overall shape of the word.
1 person has voted this message useful



Ari
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 Message 31 of 31
15 January 2012 at 1:52pm | IP Logged 
fiziwig wrote:
and how long does it take a learner to look up an unfamiliar word?

Takes me about five seconds on the iPhone.

To Smallwhite: Researching this a bit more it turns out I was pretty wrong. I've been hanging out a lot with typographers and they claim we read by looking a the word shape, but in later years people seem to have found it's a bit more complicated than that. While it's pretty uncontroversial that we read capitalised words slower, it has mostly to do with practice. It looks like we read by skipping with our eyes across the page, focussing on a few letters at a time and letting our knowledge of the language fill in the blanks. We look at enough letters to be able to draw conclusions based on grammar and vocabulary.

Chinese characters are different and since we can only focus on a pretty small area of the page at one time, it seems you can glance better at a few characters. In a longer text, you'd need to make shorter eye movements since you can't "fill in the blanks" as much with more compressed information. I'm not sure if that turns out to give Chinese an edge or not in terms of reading speed.


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