Written Chinese may be based on diagrams rather than words composed of characters that are inspired by a sound the mouth can made, but there's also a pattern when it comes to reading Chinese characters. I don't know enough Chinese to give a Chinese example, but some characters are created by compounding a radical with a meaning with a radical based on how it's read, such as 五(read as: go), 悟 (go), 語(go); or 古(ko), 個(ko), 故(ko). From patterns like this, even if you don't know a kanji you can sometimes guess how to read it, such as: 伍 and 固. (not that you'll always be right, but it won't be impossible for others to guess what character you're thinking of)

You've gotta also consider that in English, different words are different lengths, and the alphabet itself has parts that dip down like the tail on the letter "y" (descender) and parts that poke up, like the letter "h" (ascender). Also, for the alphabet, some letters are fatter than others, such as w and m, and some are much thinner, such as i, l, j, t.

On the other hand, many Chinese words are two letter compounds, so the amount of space a word takes up is practically identical.

Last edited by ocircle (2009 October 13, 6:27 pm)

yudantaiteki wrote:

The differences are not so clear cut, because there is a visual element in western writing as well (skilled readers read in chunks, not phoneme by phoneme), and there is a sound component to kanji reading as well (I'm pretty sure subvocalization has been confirmed in Chinese and Japanese readers, not just Western ones).  There have been some interesting experiments that strongly suggest that native Japanese process kanji primarily for the sound value rather than meaning.

That paper seems a little strange to me, I don't understand this part of the abstract: "It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia."  Doesn't every language have either a transparent or opaque orthography-to-phonology mapping?

But it would be interesting to know more about this -- wikipedia has 識字プロセスには文字や単語を構成する音に結びつけて分析する「音韻的処理」（ひらがな、カタカナ、アルファベットなど主に表音文字）から、単語、文章そのものからダイレクトに意味を理解する「正字法的処理」（漢字のような表意文字も含む）までいくつかの段階がある。, but no more details than that and no sources cited.

Here's an article about dyslexia:
http://www.nistep.go.jp/achiev/ftx/jpn/ … _fa01.html

the article wrote:

先天的に神経学的素因の発現する頻度には、国や人種による差は認められず、軽度の例を含めると、全人口の６〜10％の人々が素因を持っていると報告されている3〜５）。しかし障害のある人にとっては、音韻と綴りの関係が不規則な言葉が特に読みにくいので、使用言語が不規則表記を含む度合いが高いと、学習過程における言語獲得の困難として顕在化する程度が高い。日本語は、仮名の規則性が高く、読み方が分からなくても漢字から意味が推測される事があるため、ディスレキシアは他言語に比較すれば顕在化し難いが、網羅的検査は行なわれていない。２都市（人口40万人と５万人）の３つの公立小学校（1〜6年次）の調査でディスレキシア顕在化率は、音読に関し、平仮名１％・カタカナ２〜３％・漢字５〜６％、書字では平仮名２％・カタカナ５％・漢字７〜９％となっている６）。

It's not that the Japanese don't hear the internal voice when reading. I guess my post was poorly worded, but hearing text and seeing it are not mutually exclusive; maybe it has more to do with the difference in how to hear text.

As you said, skilled readers read English in chunks, and I think "seeing text" is part of the speed-reading skills. In Japanese it seems the technique is not exclusive to skilled readers but rather everyone needs to acquire it to read the language. And it seems a lot easier to do that in Japanese because of the regularity of the sound-to-kana mapping and the meaning-to-shape mapping in kanji, hence the fewer number of individuals who are "diagnosed" as dyslexic.

According to the article, there is no difference in the rate of occurrence of congenital dyslexia between races and nationalities, i.e., Japanese is easier for dyslexic people so they don't always realize that they have the learning disorder.

Also, it's not a Western languages v.s. Asian languages thing per se. I heard native speakers of some European languages such as Italian were less frequently diagnosed as dyslexic because they're easier to guess the correct reading. It's just Japanese kana are regular like those Western languages, and kanji work in a different way than an alphabet so that dyslexia isn't always a problem for people to read.

Last edited by magamo (2009 October 13, 8:54 pm)