I’ve often wondered if deaf people in countries where logograms are used have an easier time learning to read despite having to learn more individual characters.
Logogram systems are often based on a representation of an object, the symbol for “house” looks like a house and so on. And then there are modifiers which are used to express similar “house” ideas.
In contrast imagine trying to read and understand the text “house” without ever having heard the word. It would just be a jumble of characters. Imagine trying to remember that something which looks like “$8%@)” means “a dwelling”, but “!8%@)” means “a small rodent”, because the first character changed the word from “house” to “mouse”.
(On the other hand — In the book “From Bonsai to Levi’s”, the author George Fields mentions that people who grew up with the Japanese kanji would state that the meaning of a character was obvious. Then they were shown with “made up” (newly created) kanji and asked to provide the meaning. As you might expect, responses varied.)
But how is learning to associate the written word ‘house’ with a house all that different from learning to associate the spoken word ‘house’ with a house? ISTM that a jumble of characters is about he same as a jumble of sounds.
A toddler, with all their senses working, certainly has the advantage of seeing the written word and hearing it to make learning what it means easier. But for someone born without being able to hear, with no concept of what ‘hearing’ even means, I’m WAGing that it’s not as hard as you think it is, especially with teachers that specialize in it.
Youtuber Tommy Edison has been blind from birth. It’s interesting hearing about a lot of what he learned and how he learned to do it and a lot of it has to do with not having any concept of seeing so when he learns something new, sight never even comes into play. Granted, he’s blind, not deaf, but I’m nearly certain there are deaf youtubers doing similar shows. IIRC, he’s had some of them on over the years.
Notice how the logograph is made from two characters, or pictures. Maybe not the best example (a picture of a pig under a roof means house), but there is at least SOME logic involved.
Japanese (and Chinese) logograms do indeed have basic shapes (radicals) that re-appear in word with similar meanings. They are pretty esoteric though so most can’t be understood just by looking at them. You need someone to teach the shapes to you so you can get a clue as to the meaning of new words.
Just look at the kanji pair for “add” in Japanese. Plug it in to google translate. It has a recognizable shape but it doesn’t look like adding anything, does it?
Same with English. You need to learn the forms, but once you do, you can make guesses as to the kind of meaning a word might have. For example, you only need to learn the affix “trans” a few times before you cotton on that it means movement of some kind. But t r a n s doesn’t convey anything until someone taught you.
In summary, logograms, aren’t much better than English letters, they take longer to learn because there are so many of them, and are less useful worldwide. The benefit is that they can compress the same meaning of English letters into a smaller physical space on a page.
The first time I visited Japan, before I could use google maps there, I spent a lot of time looking at maps and street signs. I had a bilingual map, and I’d find the place I wanted to go using the English, then look at the kanji, and look for street signs based on matching kanji.
Rather to my surprise, I knew about 20 or 30 characters by the time I left. Common street and tourist things, like mountain, shrine, in, out, yen, etc. I had sort of tried to learn the local alphabet, but never made any progress, and found it easier to just “read” the kanji in train stations.
So… while you can learn an alphabet and then be able to read most anything, the “learning curve” is shallower and more accessible for characters, in my experience. (It just keeps going up forever, because there are SO many characters.)
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if character-based writing is easier for deaf people, who don’t get to immediately translate everything once they get over that initial alphabetic learning hump.
Most people don’t give a passing thought to “pig under roof means house.” (And does that even make sense? That should be ‘barn’, shouldn’t it?). It’s a useful memory aid for foreigners; that’s about as far as it goes.
It’s mostly second-language-learners who lean on those visual elements as a memory aid. Natives simply see “that symbol is uchi which means house, unless it’s part of another word, where it might take on a completely different sound and a meaning entirely unrelated to any house-related concept.”
In principle, I would see that extra layer of encoding as being unnecessary effort for the deaf person. But in practice, people generally don’t experience languages as an ongoing conscious application of well-defined rules. They just sort of absorb it as a skill like walking or bicycling, by trial and error, without nary a thought to orthography or syntax.
I can read a (very) modest amount of Japanese. The first time I went, I was there for a couple of months, with language lessons every morning. Right at the beginning, before I’d learned much of anything, my host sent me to visit a lab in Sapporo (we were in Tsukuba, outside Tokyo). At the time, that involved an overnight trip on a bus and three different train lines. As soon as I stepped off the Shinkansen in Sendai, there was no more English. Still, I was able to make the rest of my tight connections by matching doodles between tickets, platform signs, and trains (it helps immeasurably that the Japanese are actually interested in transporting people and think signage should make sense).
A few years ago, we made a family trip to South Korea. Before we left, I learned Hangul in about an hour. It’s alphabetical, completely regular, and logical (the shapes of the characters even give hints at pronunciation). The Koreans are justifiably proud of its invention several hundred years ago. Despite being able to pronounce it, much to my chagrin, I never managed to learn to read or speak any appreciable amount of Korean at all. Still, we found it extremely helpful that I could recognize tram stops and restaurant names by sounding them out.
I ultimately found my early experiences with written Korean and written Japanese very similar, even though one is purely alphabetic and the other is a combination of logographic and phonemic. Sight “reading” was not too hard to pick up and really useful, but actually understanding anything was something else altogether.
Other than making up our own mnemonics to amuse ourselves (we spent a lot of time on the Thunder Chicken train line for some reason), I didn’t find a whole lot of utility in learning “pig under a roof”. Learning the radicals and stroke orders is really important, but the pictographic nature breaks down pretty quickly. For one thing, the pictures have been getting simplified and distorted for thousands of years, but even more, a lot of concepts are really only vaguely derivable from the original, pictographic meaning of the radicals that make up the characters. This is probably why many superficially pictographic systems (Mayan, Egyptian, …) turn out not to be pictographic at all.
As for the OP, my guess is that logographic systems are not any easier for the deaf to learn and may actually be harder. While literacy in Japan is extraordinarily high, my understanding (no cite handy) is that the onset of literacy happens later for Japanese children, presumably because the written language is so freaking complicated.
That makes sense. I certainly never learned anything like “pig under house”, just that “this shape means temple”. But the shapes I did learn had fewer parts than their English written counterparts (fewer total strokes, I suppose) and looked … less like each other than many pairs of English words?
Maybe those advantages go away once you are trying to learn your 50th or 100th character.
Also, with kanji plus two alphabets, I don’t doubt that it’s hard to Japanese kids to learn to read.
One thing to keep in mind is that to a signing deaf person, English (or any spoken language) is a foreign language and must be learned as such. If you have ever learned a foreign with a different alphabet, learning that alphabet is the least of your difficulties. Learning Kanji would be a different matter of course.
Are we talking about Chinese or Japanese in this thread? They are completely different languages (though modern Japanese has imported a significant amount of Chinese vocabulary). Unfortunately, I could not find a chart comparing literacy rates among the hearing-impaired among different countries to look for any kind of trends.
This “pig under house” stuff seems, well, not useless or completely irrelevant for learning Chinese characters, but any initially “realistic” pictures have undergone millennia of evolution to what you find today in printed literature, let along people’s semi-cursive or cursive handwriting, and in any case over 90% of Chinese characters are phono-semantic compounds whose components are themselves not reliable guides to either meaning or pronunciation. Also, some of the most common words are for grammatical particles or other abstract uses.What is 爲 (do, make, be) supposed to be, for instance? Wiktionary says a hand guiding an elephant, or a female macaque.
In my own experience, the reading and writing drills, copying lines, etc. in Japanese and Chinese are not substantially different to other languages, and words and phrases become familiar through repetition rather than by trying to break down individual characters.
I would venture to say that the (usually) two or three radicals that make up a Chinese character seldom have anything to do with the meaning. Sometimes they refer to the pronunciation; more often they relate to a pronunciation that the character once had, a thousand years ago, and is completely irrelevant now. Sometimes they relate to the meaning only very indirectly, and often they don’t relate to either the meaning or the pronunciation. There are a handful of characters I learned by some kind of mnemonic based on the radicals but far more often it’s just memorization of a seemingly meaningless shape. I do remember learning 好 (good) as “woman + child” but even here there isn’t a very obvious connection to the meaning.
I’ve heard that Japanese pronounces things closer to how they were pronounced in the Tang Dynasty than any modern Chinese dialect because Kukai had developed kana, which slowed phonemic drift.
Of course, I’m not sure how anybody knows how the Tang pronounced anything. Maybe from poetry or songs?
One thing that helps casual learners is the fact that some simple kanji are used everywhere. The single character 田 (“ta”, rice field) is part of many 2-character words for city names, proper names, company names, brand names. Visually it’s easy to remember, but practically it is incredibly useful. This is true of many if most of the kanji place names.
More than anything I find it’s the stroke count. 1-7 strokes is pretty easy to memorize or figure out some visual cue for yourself. From 8-20 strokes, that knowledge has to be anchored by vocabulary use, component breakdown, rote memorization and writing practice.
Even after all that, you may just forget the damned thing anyway after a couple years. Even some Japanese people are losing part of that literacy due to autocomplete on smartphones, not being able to identify or come up with a kanji that you don’t use in conversation.
Tangentially related to the idea that the meaning of a character should derive from its radicals: There’s book series Learning Chinese Characters whose approach is based on the idea that people remember stories better than they remember shapes. It associates a little story with each character, based on the character’s radicals. Three mnemonics are employed: the theme of the story relates to the meaning of the character, a key word in the story cues the pronunciation of the word, and one of five stock characters in the story cues the tone of the word (for example a dwarf is the standard cue for the falling tone). So for example 动 (pronounced dòng, meaning “move”) is made of radicals 云 (“cloud”) and 力 (“power”). The story the book gives is
A tornado cloud has the power to move anything. It can even knock the dwarf off his donkey.
So if you can remember that story, you know the shape, pronunciation, tone and meaning. I think it’s an interesting approach.
In conversation, my brother once pointed out that an original name of an object was Western Melon. “No it’s not” he was told. So he pointed at the characters: ‘Western’, ‘Melon’. “Oh”, she said, “I never noticed that”.
Yeah, I once had a frustrating conversation like that.
“What do the characters in Osaka mean?”
“It means Osaka. It’s a city.”
“But what do the characters actually mean. The first one is clearly ‘big’, so what’s the other one?”
“It means ‘big Saka’. Stop asking so many stupid questions.”
Turns out the meaning is ‘big slope’, and I didn’t see any big slopes there, so my mnemonic for remembering was going to be ‘city named big slope that doesn’t actually have any big slopes’. But then my eyeballs realized it was just easier to read the damn word as written.
Oh it’s a big (though irregular) slope down to the ocean from Kyoto to the Osaka bay. That’s what I always took Osaka to mean. I did not research this point though, just my supposition.
