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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For Japanese at least, there are characters that represent syllable sounds as well as the complex Chinese style characters. They use small versions of the syllable characters beside uncommon characters, unusual readings, or in teaching materials to show how to pronounce them.
You can’t. The really weird thing is when you know the character’s pronunciation in one but not another, when you’re reading something in one ‘voice’ and the ‘voice’ from the other language will come and interject on you.
They can be composed smaller symbols that the reader does know. Kind of like our compound words.
Some languages that look like ideograms are actually an alphabet or syllabary. Japanese makes use of come Chinese characters (kangi?) But their commonly used written words are made by symbols with assigned sounds.
Similarly, Korean (hangul) is the one written language that is easiest to learn how to read due to the efforts of Sejeong the great – one of the previous kings of Korean. You can learn the phonetic assignments to their alphabet in minutes and read/pronounce the written language within the day. But learning the grammar and vocabulary comes separately.
For Chinese, you can’t.
You can guess, but if you don’t know the character, you probably won’t know how to say it or understand it.
Keep in mind that Chinese is tonal (i.e. the inflection). Different tones for the same sound can have different meanings. So not only do you need to know what sound the character is, but also the tone. Looking at a character may give clues, but there is no way to know exactly.
Some characters in Chinese have similar sounds because they share some common “strokes” and one can always try to guess the sound of a character one hasn’t learned before (or even forgot). But most of the times if you can’t recognize a character, you gotta use a dictionary or ask someone else how to read it and pronounce it
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