How do you read foreign languages?

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

This is prompted by a little derailment Kimpatsu and I have engaged in here;

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=1870798655#post1870798655

I'm wondering how non-native speakers of non-Roman alphabetical languages do what they do.

On the one hand, I can sort of read French and hear the words more or less as I hear English in my head, but with a kind of double voice translating what I've read into what I need to think in, but a couple of times recently I've transliterate Russian Cyrillic signs into Roman letters to show my daughter that the language itself can be read like ours, but I have to laboriously work it out letter by letter, I can't "see" it in one go. I presume that reasonable non-native Russian speakers are able to do with Russian what I do with French and that good ones read it on autopilot like I do with English.

What I'm intrigued by is the languages that are written by completely different rules. What do those of you who have learnt Chinese and Japanese pictograms "see" and hear in your head?

 

[Kimpatsu]

When I'm speaking or thinking in Japanese, I "see" Japanese in my head; I don't think in Romanised Japanese, or grope for phonetic English equivalents. In the early days, however, I did indeed "think" in romaji; the ability to think in Japanese and respond to Chinese/Japanese characters came about the 1,000th character mark. (This seems to be a watershed for all non-native speakers of Asian languages.)
If you improved your Russian, it would all come in one go to you; it's lack of familiarity that makes you spell out each letter laboriously. (FYI, I still read Russian in much the same way.) French I can read no problem.
But it's still all Greek to me...

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Can you read calligraphy? Some styles of calligraphic text are created very quickly so that the detailed letter structures break down. With the Roman alphabet you only have 26 letter shapes to distinguish and so you can mess with them a lot but still leave them legible. How redundant is the structure of their pictograms? My assumption would be that when you have 10's of thousands of different characters, even quite small variances from the standard would introduce ambiguity.

 

[Kimpatsu]

Can you read calligraphy? Some styles of calligraphic text are created very quickly so that the detailed letter structures break down. With the Roman alphabet you only have 26 letter shapes to distinguish and so you can mess with them a lot but still leave them legible. How redundant is the structure of their pictograms? My assumption would be that when you have 10's of thousands of different characters, even quite small variances from the standard would introduce ambiguity.

The short answer is that it depends on the context and the penmanship. There are some scrolls in museums, such as at Osaka Castle, that I can't read at all, even with the modern transliteration supplied. Yesterday, however, I had lunch at a restaurant with a lovely scroll on display above the door, and I could read and decipher that.
My tutor at uni was working on a similar, medieval manuscript when I was a student. He told me that whereas he was good at guessing what certain characters must be from context, his Japanese wife was better at identifying individual characters in isolation. Between them, they succeeded in transliterating the text, from which he could write a translation. The biggest problem with ancient calligraphy is the sosho, or cursive script. (Like joined-up handwriting.) That can be so oblique as to render decipherment almost impossible.
I hope that answers your question.

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Most excellent. Thank you.

 

[Brown]

What I'm intrigued by is the languages that are written by completely different rules. What do those of you who have learnt Chinese and Japanese pictograms "see" and hear in your head?

I often see the mnemonics suggested by Michael Rowley in his book, "Kanji Pictographics."

 

[LostAngeles]

I'm learning Japanese right now.

Kana and Kanji... well, right now, the kanji I immediately translate into English if I don't have the furigana(sp?) and it's surrounded by words or other kanji that I don't know. If I do know it, then I put it into "audible words" mentally and go from there. Right now though I tend to read through the kana and break it into words as I recognize them.

I translate French as I read it, which happens to be the only way I can understand French because... I don't know. That's just how it is. I can no longer speak it, I can no longer hear and understand sufficiently, but I can read it fairly well.

 

[teddosan]

When I read Japanese, I read the characters completely differently depending on how "well" I know the character. There are some characters that are so common that I don't even translate it back in my head, some I immediately just picture the English equivalent, and some I only understand in context.
I've thought about this before... When I just glance or even see in my peripheral vision an English word or sentence, it's right there... I mean, I get it instantaneously. It's simply not like that with Japanese. I have to look at the characters one by one and "assemble" them all together to get the meaning of a whole phrase.

 

[TillEulenspiegel]

I have a question that may be a bit OOT

I do not have the gift of tongues, I always wondered how speakers on a non native language think.
Do you think in terms of Your native language and translate or does your frame of reference change and you think in the language being spoken?
My language requirement was fulfilled by taking a programming language which was great as it was adjunct to my career path.

When I think of a problem or flow of programming I think in terms of the programming dialect not English.

Anyone?

 

[Kimpatsu]

Personally speaking, I started off thinking in English and transliterating, but now when I work in Japanese, I think in Japanese, and French likewise. (Although 90% of my dreams are still in English.)
As a translator, the real key is to hold both languages in your head simultaneously, though.

 

[malbui]

I do not have the gift of tongues, I always wondered how speakers on a non native language think.
Do you think in terms of Your native language and translate or does your frame of reference change and you think in the language being spoken?

For me, the mark of fluency has always been when I've left the framework of other languages behind and thought only in terms of the language I was trying to use. I remember when I was an undergrad in Germany: for about 10 weeks I was completely lost and then all of a sudden a switch flicked in my brain and the German just started pouring out without me having to think about it. Immersion is a wonderful thing.

Incidentally, I've always been fascinated by the nature of a gift for languages. The current Mrs Malbui and I are both multilingual, but our talents (such as they are) are completely different. She is an accomplished musician and picks up on differences of intonation, often subtle, that I simply cannot hear, essentially building a phonetic model of a language in her head, whilst I'm a grammarian and need a solid structural understanding of a language before I can use it, in the same way that I learned C and Prolog back in the day.

 

[TeaBag420]

When I read Chinese (and I'm right up around the 1,000 character barrier someone else mentioned) I don't "hear" either the english or chinese sound of the character; what appears to my mind is either the meaning of the character, or "I don't know what this means".

With Russian, I just read it. It's just a pretend alphabet.

With Tibetan, I hear the pronounciation and I know the english term. Maybe because I have to process all those silent letters, but if I'm working with a Ladakhi, I tend to pronounce them.

 

[Kimpatsu]

When I read Chinese (and I'm right up around the 1,000 character barrier someone else mentioned) I don't "hear" either the english or chinese sound of the character; what appears to my mind is either the meaning of the character, or "I don't know what this means".

That was me.
Expect a sudden change in your appreciation for Chinese characters any day now.

 

[Loon]

Coming late to the party...

I think it has to do with familiarity. You just get used to it. The same way you can look at the English word "incorrigible" and know what it means without having to sound it out, even though you might have to sound out a different word, like "epiglottal."

The difference is that there are not necessarily cues to the sounds of the words built into the writing systemb (at least for Chinese and Japanese)


Another example, would be coded alphabets: You can get used to a single-character replacement cipher pretty easily. Think of Cyrillic and Korean (to a certain extent- Korean works differently from everything else) and other alphabets this way.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Also mathematics.

You can't learn it if you can't read it.

I think math teachers should actually read and write the mathematical "sentences" aloud, so students can learn how to say it in their head.

to me, this f(x) reads "Eff open brackets ex close brackets".

I'm sure mathematicians don't read it that way.

 

[TeaBag420]

Also mathematics.

You can't learn it if you can't read it.

I think math teachers should actually read and write the mathematical "sentences" aloud, so students can learn how to say it in their head.

to me, this f(x) reads "Eff open brackets ex close brackets".

I'm sure mathematicians don't read it that way.

Not only mathematicians, but first semester calculus students read it as "f of x", which is short for "function of x" and it's not unusual for math books to say this explicitly, nor for teachers to say it aloud.

 

[LostAngeles]

Not only mathematicians, but first semester calculus students read it as "f of x", which is short for "function of x" and it's not unusual for math books to say this explicitly, nor for teachers to say it aloud.

Also pre-calculus students.

I remember learning in Algebra II that 4! was not said "4!" and that ln is sometimes pronounced "lahn," although I've never heard that since. Then there's sinh (sinch), cosh (cosh), tanh (tanch), and sech (seech). I forget how the others are pronounced, which is sad, because this was all in the last chapter with inverse functions, but to me, I just read it as "hyperbolic <blah>." The inverse trig functions are generally written like sin^-1 but read as arcsine or arcwhatever.

And this, clearly, is tan (language thread).

Sorry 'bout that.

 

[Jorghnassen]

The inverse trig functions are generally written like sin^-1 but read as arcsine or arcwhatever.

I hate that ambiguous notation. I always write "arc sin". Then again, to me ln and log (as in I never use the "ln" notation) are the same bloody thing...

Interesting topic though. Being bilingual and not having the time to learn any new language, I have a hard time remembering what it feels like to begin understanding a different system, starting by association with a known language.

 

[LostAngeles]

I hate that ambiguous notation. I always write "arc sin". Then again, to me ln and log (as in I never use the "ln" notation) are the same bloody thing...

Interesting topic though. Being bilingual and not having the time to learn any new language, I have a hard time remembering what it feels like to begin understanding a different system, starting by association with a known language.

Supposedly the changes and alternatives in writing it are due to the advent of using computers to calculate these things. "arcsin" can be written one line, for example.

As far as log and ln go, apparently, some upper division textbooks use log for ln and will note if it's a different base, say, log₁₀ or such, instead of log being log₁₀ and ln being log_e.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Soapy said:
to me, this f(x) reads "Eff open brackets ex close brackets".

Man, that's verbose. It's "eff of ex."


~~ Paul