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.
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers