Westerners shudder at the idea of reading even the most basic street signs and instructions in Chinese, a language with 6,000 characters to memorize to be considered fluent.
A new set of brain images shows why: Reading English-style alphabets and Chinese characters use very different parts of the brain.
The results also suggest that Chinese schoolchildren with reading problems misfire in a different brain region than the one used in reading alphabet-based languages like English. This demonstrates that the learning disorder dyslexia is not the same in every culture and does not have a universal biological cause, researchers said.
Ah, I thought so. I think my brain is hard wired for reading the Latin alphabet only. I can read Chinese but I can’t scan it. I can’t scan cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian etc.) either.
It takes a really long time to be able to scan, especially since we are taught to read Chinese by reading out loud (how many of us had to read out loud in class – you know, count ahead and try to figure out which sentence would be yours so you could make sure you knew all the characters??)
I don’t scan particularly well but as I need to be able to for my job (for example, if they hand me a speech in Chinese 2 minutes before the speaker is going to deliver it), I’ve taught myself to do it to some degree.
My cousin and his daughter are dyslexic. I still remember teaching her Chinese characters about 15 years ago. To my surprise, she brought it up a few years back and could even still write the characters. I wish I could remember characters that well!!
Scan reading in our first languages seems to be something that we don’t need to be “taught.” For a second language, though, I think it is something that a teacher has to force a student to do with timed scanning and skimming reading tasks. If you aren’t forced to do it, you may never build these kinds of reading strategies in a second or third language.
Friends of mine who are strong in Spanish, French or other languages that have a strong teaching as a second language field all say that they were taught how to build extensive and intensive reading skills. This is something that is completely overlooked by most teachers of Chinese as a second language. As Ironlady wrote above, we are usually taught to read aloud in the Chinese classroom. My observation is that most native Chinese speakers are taught to do the same in their own language. Reading is treated as not just reading, but also as a pronunciation checking activity. This is done in early primary education classrooms in the US, but not for very long; I guess once a kid gets the basics of phonics, then there is no need to do it any more. I suppose it takes a Chinese learner (either native or non-native) longer to do this since the written language is not phonetic. I’ve heard University students reading aloud to themselves in Chinese when they are studying. When I asked them why, they just responded that it helps them remember better. I don’t think that is true. I think they are just trapped in the habit and haven’t yet learned how to scan quietly for detail.
Two of my wife’s sisters are primary English teachers here in HK. When reading English, they always read aloud, or at least mouth the words. When they were doing their teaching diplomas, I actually used one of their textbooks to point out that reading aloud is not a good habit. They just didn’t get it. They are convinced that it helps them “improve their oral ability,” whatever that means.
I can usually scan Chinese pretty well, but only because I found a good textbook that focuses on building reading skills - it’s BLU’s second year reading comprehension book. A lot of the readings in it are boring, but the structure of the reading tasks is perfect. Sometimes when I’m tired or I’m reading something with a literary flavor, I catch myself pronouncing the words in my head as I read, which is almost as bad as mouthing them or reading aloud. I don’t know exactly what causes me to do that. Once I start doing it, I can’t really turn it off. It definitely slows me down. I think quite a lot of Chinese people do the same, though. In my opinion, Chinese is a language that takes longer to learn how to scan. However, once you do learn how to scan it, it can probably be scanned just as fast or faster than English.
