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Are you literate in languages you study? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4462 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 1 of 18 29 March 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Many people brag about being fluent in a language, yet not many mention they are able to write and read,
why is that? Is reading and writing less important than speaking? I know it is difficult to write and read in languages which have no fixed written norm (like creoles, or many aboriginal languages), but what about languages with thousands of years of written culture, like Chinese? I've heard many Chinese say the written form is the essence of Chinese (including all dialects), and not the spoken form. Yet, many foreigners don't like to hear that, they mostly strive to be fluent in Putonghua, rarely if ever mentioning they're literate in Chinese. I'm puzzled. How many foreigners pick up a book or a magazine in Mandarin (or Japanese) and engage in pleasure reading? Edited by Medulin on 29 March 2014 at 8:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3735 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 18 29 March 2014 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Neither my Chinese nor Japanese is of sufficient level yet to engage in reading for pleasure, though I certainly consider it important.
I think a lot of people probably don't mention that they're "literate" in a language because these days being "fluent" in a language is generally assumed to include literacy - and in the case of languages with anything close to a phonetic writing system, literacy will come by itself with fluency, once one knows the alphabet, so assuming it isn't much of a push. So mentioning literacy seems superfluous, if it can be inferred from fluency. That said, some people do consider literacy more important than fluency, and learn primarily to be able to read. This is almost certainly the case with many Muslims who are not native speakers of Arabic, for example, but whose beliefs lead them to want to be able to read the Qur'an in Arabic. Similarly many Christians are moved to learn Greek and Hebrew for a similar reason. I know I for one certainly like to read things in their original languages rather than in translation, wherever possible. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6376 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 18 29 March 2014 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If by "Chinese" you mean "Mandarin", it has a few hundred years of written culture, and only about a century of large-scale usage. If you mean Literary Sinitic, it does have over a thousand years of literary culture, but nobody would claim to speak it, since it's a dead language.
The Chinese are very fond of their writing system, and are likely to say such things, but these kinds of statements are based on an uninformed view of how the Chinese languages work (hint: they work just like all other languages). That said, it is a pretty amazing system and I'm very fond of it.
Quite few. I do read books in Mandarin (though nowadays I do it with Cantonese pronunciations in my head, like Hongkongers do), as well as books in Cantonese (when I can find one) and I read books that I find interesting (usually popular science books). However, my motivation isn't primarily one of pleasure, as I read to maintain and improve my languages. Does this count as "reading for pleasure"? 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5560 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 18 29 March 2014 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's not so difficult in Japanese. Writing, that's the issue. I make the silliest mistakes when converting kana to kanji, I never know when a word is so rare I should use kana instead of the kanji I can recognize - and, well, don't remind me of trying to write by hand without looking up most of the kanji. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4894 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 5 of 18 30 March 2014 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think I have to agree with David Styles. People generally use "fluent" to mean that they've got everything covered as far as living languages go.
As an avid reader, literacy is very important to me. It's to the point that I fully intend for my reading abilities to surpass my speech in German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5128 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 18 30 March 2014 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my strongest languages, English and Spanish, I can read and write just about as well as I can speak. In
French I have no problem reading, and do so also for pleasure, but between my dyslexia and the fact that I am 32 years out of practise, it takes me for ever and a day the few times that I attempt to write it - not even quite sure what the quality would be like now, but perhaps I should make it my personal little challenge, to write more in French :-) Those are the only languages I would say I am fluent in ( I assume "saying" in your context equals "bragging" :-) As for the others that I can speak but that I am definitely not fluent in (German, Italian and Swedish) reading Swedish is a piece of cake and a pleasure, both because the languages are so close and because I have read so much in it, but I cannot write it. At all. In Italian I can and have read for pleasure, but the last years I have done it mostly during the Tadoku challenge. I do very occasionally write it, in a "close my eyes and forget about perfectionism" sort of way. It works, I get my meaning through, but I assume that I make a ton of mistakes. As for German I do not think I have ever written it outside a school like context, and even in those situations I do it very grudgingly. Writing German publicly would feel like going to the beach with legs that are white as snow after a long winter and unshaven. Not a feeling I tend to go for. As for Russian, that is not yet in the group I speak, (working very hard on it though :-) my writing level is such that I feel a huge feeling of accomplishment if I write a text message in Russian and the message I receive in return indicates that it was fully understood. Baby steps. :-) Edit: After writing this, I decided that I needed to test myself, so today I wrote a few sentences in my log from every language I know or learn. It wasn't so bad actually :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 30 March 2014 at 10:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6497 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 18 30 March 2014 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For me reading is by far the easiest skill - one which I even can use in languages I haven't studied if I just know something that resembles it. So if I claim that I can speak or write a language it is almost 100% certain that I also can read it. And I can read things like Afrikaans and Icelandic fairly fluently, and others like Greek and Russian with a few lookups. But so far I don't claim to speak them. Writing is harder to place on the scale. I have written in more than 20 languages in my log, but with weak languages I need to look a number of words up and sometimes I have to check a grammatical construction or form. But I can if need be write messages at least in the languages which I claim to speak - if I had to look words up all the time I wouldn't claim to speak them.
And Chinese? Eh, not on my list. But if I for some reason had to study some kind of Chinese I would probably try to learn the language itself and the writing system simultaneously with Pinyin as bridge. And in principle you could claim that writing in Pinyin also is a way to write in your preferred variant of Chinese, though not the 'right' way to do it. And I would certainly be able to read Pinyin before I could write it. Whether I also could learn thousands of funny small drawings before I could learn to speak the language behind them is a totally open question - it hasn't been tested, and I doubt that it ever will. Learning only through the ear would be totally against my way of studying languages, but I'm fairly sure that I would be able to read a language learnt that way straight away if I saw it written in a reasonably sensible alphabet. The only (partial) example I can recall right now is Low German, which I learnt to understand by watching Talk op Platt on NDR in primetime in the good old days. But I could read it from day one when I finally found some small books in Platt at the railway station in Flensburg. Edited by Iversen on 30 March 2014 at 2:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6999 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 8 of 18 30 March 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't know about bragging, but generally I can read my languages as well as I can hear them. I can typically read better than I can speak. It appears the original post is talking more about exotic languages with unusual writing systems.
When I was looking at FSI courses for exotics (Mandarin, Japanese), they seem to focus on speaking and listening comprehension more so than reading/writing. Edited by luke on 30 March 2014 at 2:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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