Eli5, in written languages that use ideograms, how are people able to correctly pronounce words and names they’ve never seen before?

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Just that. Written English is phonetic, so I can easily read an unfamiliar word by sounding it out. Even though I don’t always get it right, usually I’m close enough to be understood.

How does this work in Chinese, or Japanese?

Edit – OK, yes I get it! English isn’t really phonetic. It’s just that when I was learning to read and write, our school used a method they called phonics. It must have confused the heck out of most kids, because they abandoned the method soon after, but it worked for me. We had a lot of practice in recognizing the various patterns words can take, and the many exceptions. So for me, who always did very well in English class, words tend to be easy to spell out.

I’m really glad not to have to figure it out as an adult, because I’m sure I’d be just as frustrated as some of you friends are! And I promise you that you are much better at English than I am at your language.

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25 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The answer for Japanese is, recognize the radicals (individual parts of kanji) and look that up in the dictionary til you find the kanji. But also in Japanese there are a good amount, albeit with plenty exceptions, of kanji where you can guess how to read a kanji character because radicals can also serve not just as meaning, but indicators of how to pronounce a character as well.

Not sure about Languages like Chinese, but I’m seeing from other comments here that it seems to be a similar process. I won’t comment on those though, just the answer for Japanese (:

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hmm as a native who learned it from Taiwanese grade school, literacy mainly comes from pattern recognition and iterative learning. There are a few simple words you learn and then construct meaning/pronunciation from the structure of the word, then necessarily when you read you will encounter even more characters that are entwined (because most words in Chinese is a pair of characters or more), learn their pronunciation from common speech, memorize its prototype and apply it to other words.

Also, whereas in the west most of grade school English is about grammar, syntax and new word/meaning construction, most of Chinese class is about rote memorization of characters and in what context you would use it in.

Finally, This is not a rule a but a trend but Chinese characters are usually made of one meaning radical and one pronunciation radical, and most of the time the pronunciation differs by one tone, so sometimes you can just guess and get it right.

Honestly because the text is idea based its actually really easy to comprehend and read Chinese. Its the writing that’s hard.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Short answer is that you can’t correctly pronounce new characters with certainty. You can only guess.

Guessing is easier in Chinese for a number of the characters because part of the characters*sometimes* indicate “sounds-like” or “rhymes with” information, but this is not consistent, and is actually misleading in the case of characters that were minted in eras when the dominant dialect of Chinese sounded nothing like modern Mandarin.

Modern simplified Chinese often obliterated these mnemonics from the characters, making them truly arbitrary glyphs to be memorized by rote. Traditional characters are more complicated in their construction but much of the construction of characters had embedded mnemonics.

It’s even worse in Japanese, because Japan historically imported Chinese characters from three eras where different dialects were dominant, while Japanese also has native readings for which the mnemonics are meaningless. In Japanese, you just have to know. There are also hundreds of Kanji combinations for which the pronunciation is arbitrary and idiomatic with no connection to the readings of either character, known as [juku-jikun](https://www.japandict.com/lists/gikun?page=4). For these, you just have to know how these combos are read. It is truly infuriating to the frustrated learner. 60-80% feels like “you just have to know”. It is an exceedingly difficult language to bootstrap literacy in by careful application of inference. Even Chinese is easier to become literate in.

In other old ideographic/logographic writing systems such as Khitan, Jurchen, and Tangut (all of which are extinct “sino-form” languages, looking like Chinese but being unintelligible to Chinese readers) these mnemonics systems were often poor or even absent, so in those cases, you’re flat out of luck. Tangut was arguably the worst writing system ever devised, with only Akkadian, Hittite, and Japanese anywhere near its level of unnecessary complexity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

“Written English is phonetic”? Try saying “demesne” or explain which one sound *gh* represents. Maybe, just maybe, you have to learn how each word sounds. If you weer called Graham would you actually write Graham the first time?

Anonymous 0 Comments

Written English isn’t phonetic, there’s a ton of words you have to hear before you know how to pronounce them. Do you really think you’d know how to pronounce “thought”, “through” and “though” without already know how those words sounds, just from reading them?

People just learn how to say words, and learn how to spell words, so they can read a word and know how to pronounce it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

English is ”phonetic”. No, just no. Look at spanish or any slavic language for that matter.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s kind of like doing a cryptogram that you find in the newspaper. Basically you look for patterns in language, and because most of us use frequent communication for the same things, no matter what the culture, food, clothing, housing, family, so those can be Clues to figure things out. For language like Mandarin, we have had the fortune of cultures meeting and exchanging explanation. And in fact different cultures mixing their languages, can also help you find the root of whatever language you’re looking for. You can work backwards through Modern languages or ancient language is to figure out how they’ve changed over time, and kind of work backwards. It’s extremely complicated. You could also work for words from an ancient language that you understand. Anyone studying a new language and trying to figure it out, would also have all of the linguistic information that we have now and whatever was available at the time of study.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Written English is phonetic? I don’t think this is true.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t.

Being a logographic language, written Chinese takes more time to learn, since you can’t sound out the words. However, it allows people who can’t understand each other’s spoken language to communicate through writing.

A Mandarin speaker might not be able to talk to a Hokkien speaker. But they can both read the same language. Since each would read the words in their own dialect.

Anonymous 0 Comments

English is not a phonetic language though. Where did you get that from?

You learn English through trial and error, because a lot of the pronouncing makes no sense whatsoever.