Reading in Asian Languages

Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Kenneth S. Goodman, Shaomei Wang, Mieko Iventosch, Yetta M. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136682643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Reading in Asian Languages is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction of meaning which they show is fully applicable to character-based reading.

The book explains how and why non-alphabetic writing works well for its users; provides explanations for why it is no more difficult for children to learn than are alphabetic writing systems where they are used; and demonstrates in a number of ways that there is a single process of making sense of written language regardless of the orthography. Unique in its perspective and offering practical theory-based methodology for the teaching of literacy in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean to first and second language learners, it is a useful resource for teachers of increasingly popular courses in these languages in North America as well as for teachers and researchers in Asia. It will stimulate innovation in both research and instruction.

PART I

Writing Systems in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

1

THE PROCESS OF READING IN NON-ALPHABETIC LANGUAGES

An Introduction

Ken Goodman

A note from Ken Goodman: Almost half the literate world uses a system of writing that is not alphabetic. Yet there is much misunderstanding and misinformation about non-alphabetic writing systems, how they work, and how they are learned and used. The eminent linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart wrote in their book, Let’s Read: A Linguistic Approach:

In word writing each word is represented by a conventional sign, and these signs are arranged in the same order as the words in speech. Chinese writing is the most perfect system of this kind. There is a conventional character for every word in the language. To write a message you write the character which represents the first word into the upper right hand corner of the paper, below it you write the character for the second word and so on; when you have reached the bottom of the page you start again at the top, to the left of the first word, and form a second column down to the bottom or the paper, and so on. Each character represents some one Chinese word. As the vocabulary of the literate person is about twenty thousand words, this means that in order to read even moderately well one must know thousands of characters. Learning to read Chinese is a difficult task, and if the Chinese reader does not keep in practice, he is likely to lose his fluency.

(Bloomfield and Barnhart, 1961, p. 25)

Not much of this quote is accurate. Chinese writing is a system, and characters have an internal structure which makes it possible in context for readers to make sense of unfamiliar characters. And the belief that Chinese writing is hard to learn is one we challenge in this book.

This introduction includes a brief delineation of the historical and contemporary issues involving Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, and how and why they continue to be used in written communication. It also presents the unifying theme of the book: that there is a single process of making sense of print, whether it is alphabetic or non-alphabetic.

This chapter also introduces the comprehensive model of reading that the authors share and the methodology of miscue analysis which built the understanding of how reading works as a process of constructing meaning.

There is too little understanding in the Western world of the nature of non-alphabetic writing systems, how they work, what their history is, and why hundreds of millions of literate people continue to use them. Partly this situation is due to long-standing views among Europeans of Asian cultures as mysterious and inscrutable. And partly it is due to a Darwinian view of the development of writing systems. In this view, written language began with pictures, moved to iconic representation, then to ideographs and logographs—with the symbols representing ideas and/or words. Next they became syllabic, and eventually reached the pinnacle in alphabetic systems in which the writing is tied to the sound system of the language.

From this Darwinian perspective, it is hard to understand why a more primitive system would persist in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere when they could adopt an alphabet (preferably the Roman alphabet). Why should characters be used now that alphabetic writing is available? Why should Hebrew and Arabic continue to be written essentially without vowels. Should not only the fittest system survive?

There is a circularity to all this. To make sense of alphabetic writing, one must relate the graphic system to the sound system of an oral language. How can people read and write in a system that is not based on such relationships? Therefore, it must be that non-alphabetic writing is hard to learn, hard to use, and dysfunctional. But Japan has a high rate of literacy, with many kids entering school already reading. China has a tradition of literacy that predates all current orthographies. If there are illiterates in China it is more related to access to schooling than to ease of learning to read Chinese. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, where Chinese is an official language of instruction, all have high literacy rates.

There is a Marco Polo myth involved in Western attitudes toward non-alphabetic writing systems. We think because Europeans knew little of China before Marco Polo’s explorations that the Chinese were equally ignorant of European culture. But Chinese traders had been bringing silk to Europe for centuries. Chinese scholars were well aware of alphabetic writing systems. And there were many attempts to drop the use of Chinese characters and move to the use of an alphabet within China, Japan, and Korea. There is still a small vocal group in Japan that has been pushing for alphabetic writing. Masayo Yoshida (1998) states:

Satoshi Watanabe and his fellow revolutionaries have a gripe most Japanese can relate to. Writing Japanese is just too complicated, he says. The thousands of characters that must be learned just to read the evening paper is too much. It’s time consuming, inefficient.

So, Watanabe says, Japan should switch to something simpler, something more along the lines of an alphabet.

That’s where he loses his audience. While most Japanese agree the writing system is a strain, hardly anyone would dream of changing things. Blind momentum, scoffs Watanabe.

“No matter how inconvenient, people have grown accustomed to things the way they are,” said Watanabe, who is a leading member of the Kanamoji-kai, a venerable—but tiny—group calling for Japan to stop using Chinese characters …

Biten Yasumoto, a professor of linguistic psychology at Tokyo’s Sanno University, said that once memorized, kanji give readers a more direct shot of meaning than words written with an alphabet.

“Lots of people do complain about how complex kanji is,” Yasumoto said. “But we can understand the meaning of words easily at a glance, even if we can’t pronounce them.”

(Yoshida, 1998)

This proposed shift to substitute alphabetic writing is offering a solution to a problem that does not exist. There is no evidence that the current system creates any problems in acquisition or use. Furthermore, by the same logic, there should be no problems in learning and using alphabetic writing systems such as English, and yet there is much concern in the USA and other countries with problems of learning to read.

Some authorities have even argued that only alphabetic writing is capable of expressing formal logic and profound thoughts. Yet we know that great philosophical and sacred writing over the millennia was done in Chinese characters and in semi-syllabic systems like Hebrew and Arabic.

This book deals with literacy and writing systems in China, Japan, and Korea. It provides historical information about the development of these systems, and how they work for the people and the cultures that have developed them. The authors look at the writing systems from the perspective of a theory of reading as the construction of meaning by a reader in transaction with a published text. That view will be explicated in greater detail below. Some of the articles suggest methods and curriculum for first- and second-language literacy development in Asian languages. We hope in this book to help demystify the writing systems of the East for Westerners, and to help those who use these writing systems to have a theoretical base for understanding how their system works for them. We also include some chapters on teaching literacy, using this understanding of how the writing systems work. One of the marvelous things about language is that expert users can be confident in their use without being able to describe how it works. It becomes so well learned that it operates on an intuitive level. In fact, linguistic researchers have to test their theories and descriptions of a language against the intuitions of native speakers.

An Overview of How Asian Orthographies Work

Details of the way the literacy system works in each language culture are provided in several chapters in this book. Here, I present an overview to put what follows into a context. Chapter 8 provides some useful comparisons of written language and its history in Japan, Korea, China, and Viet-Nam. Of these only Viet-Nam has moved to an alphabetic system.

The writing system existed in some form long before it was standardized across China by the first Qin dynasty emperor, Shi Huangdi in 226 BCE, who was intent on consolidating his widespread domains. His tomb in Xian is the one guarded by an army of terracotta soldiers. Then, as now, there were many related but not mutually understandable languages (commonly called “dialects”) within China. A system of characters that directly represents meaning made it possible for people who did not understand each other’s speech to understand each other’s writing. Chinese merchants traveled throughout Asia and brought their writing system with them. Other Asians began by using Chinese to do their writing and then adapted the Chinese orthography to serve the needs of their own languages.

So it came to pass that Chinese, Japanese, and traditional Korean writing systems make use of Chinese characters. Just as the Roman alphabet came to be used in modern Western European languages, Koreans and Japanese built their writing systems on Chinese. Chinese characters represent meaning directly, and not the sounds system of the languages, so literate speakers of any of the three languages get much of the same meaning from the characters. This is like the system of numerals we call Arabic (but which originated in India), which is used throughout the world to write mathematical relationships. For example, 1 + 1 = 2 can be read for meaning by speakers of most of the world’s languages, including those who would not comprehend the spoken English sentence: “One and one are two.”

In Chinese, each character is morphemic—it is a unit of meaning. Characters also represent Chinese syllables. If a word is written with more than one character it is most likely to have an equal number of oral syllables. In Japanese, words are more likely to be polysyllabic. So, for the Japanese, during the period of development of the Japanese writing systems some choices had to be made about whether to read the characters with the Chinese sounds modified to fit the Japanese phonology, or read them using the Japanese words for the ideas that the characters represent. Both systems survive.

Classic Chinese writing was very terse, representing primarily content words but not function words and inflectional markers. A reform in the early twentieth century made Chinese writing a more complete representation of the grammar as well as the meaning. This reform facilitated the use of Mandarin among educated people across China as the national language. But it led to some differentiation of how the various dialects are written. In Hong Kong and San Francisco, it is common to see signs that are in Cantonese. Similarly, the busy streets of Taiwan show signs that represent Taiwanese.

In adapting Chinese writing to Japanese, two systems of syllabic symbols were developed derived from parts of Chinese characters. Each of these symbols represents a Japanese syllable. But each symbol is unique. It represents an oral syllable but has no structure that represents the phonemes of the syllable. Modern Japanese uses Chinese characters for content words (nouns, verbs, adjectiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• PART I. Writing Systems in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
• PART II. Studies of Reading in Chinese and Japanese
• PART III. Implications and Applications for Instruction
• Contributors
• Index