But no one can actually figure out what it means. However, the exact same text is comprehensible to most educated Chinese when written in the Chinese characters:. Translation: « Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den » In a stone den was a poet with the family name Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market…. Furthermore, as you know, Chinese characters are ideograms which carry certain meanings but not a definite sound. Without the Chinese characters binding them together, various dialects in China would develop in separate ways from each other and eventually into different languages. This might eventually give rise to regional separatism, destroying the unity of Chinese language and culture.
However, there is certain beauty in the intricacy of the Chinese characters. From something as arbitrary as a soccer team nickname , to an ancient Chinese idiom , to even something as simple as how to say "air-conditioner" in Chinese , the complexity of the Chinese characters is what allows them to hold multiple meanings.
Perhaps that is the reason that this deeply pictorial language has persisted throughout thousands of years. Founded in , TutorGroup, the parent company of TutorMing, created the first commercially available synchronous learning portal in the world. Chinese T9 is a stroke-based system, and different keys represented different strokes.
With predictive text anticipating the next character, a typist on T9 averaged just 1. For reference, common Chinese characters are made up of nine strokes on average. This is a huge leap in efficiency. Yet alternative, faster typing methods in English, like ShapeWriter or Swype that let you swipe through the letters of the word in one motion, have struggled to catch on outside of early adopters. Who wants to completely relearn how to interact with their phone just to type a little bit faster?
That language is also jarring because the West as default has gone unchallenged for so long. The telegraph was developed with the alphabet in mind. So was the typewriter. And the computer. And internet protocols. And yes, Chinese speakers spent a century conforming their language to those technologies until computing power transcended them, resulting in a relationship with technology richer and more complicated than in the alphabetic world. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
It seems the web browser you're using doesn't support some of the features of this site. For the best experience, we recommend using a modern browser that supports the features of this website. Chinese writing is logographic, that is, every symbol either represents a word or a minimal unit of meaning. From the aspects of sound, every Chinese character represents one syllable. Many of these syllables are also words, but we should not think that every word in modern Chinese is monosyllabic.
So, when we say that Chinese has a logographic writing system, one in which each basic symbol represents an independent syllable, we are speaking of the Chinese of a much earlier period. How many characters does the average literate Chinese person know? Studies carried out in China have shown that full literacy requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. Learning so many characters is very time-consuming and places a heavy burden on students.
This has led many Chinese in the past to advocate the abolition of characters in favor of an alphabetic system, but such programs have met with little success. We will return to the question of script reform below. Although literacy requires the knowledge of a few thousand characters, the total number of characters is much greater. A dictionary produced in the eleventh century contained more than fifty-three thousand characters.
Even when one takes into account that many of these characters represented rare words and many others were merely different ways of writing the same word, the number still seems staggering. Fortunately, the average person is required to know only a small percentage of this enormous number. It is interesting that both printing and movable type were invented in China. The latter, however, was little used until modern times. Most printing used wooden blocks on which characters were carved individually in meticulous detail.
Undoubtedly the reason for this was the large number of characters used in ordinary printing; it was easier to carve individual blocks than it was to create a stock of several thousand type and set it by hand. On the other hand, movable type is eminently suited to alphabetic writing systems.
Nowadays characters can easily be written on a computer, and older methods of printing are rapidly disappearing. Chinese writing has a history of some three thousand five hundred years. It is not as old as Sumerian or Egyptian writing; there is no certain evidence, however, that the invention of writing in China was in any way stimulated by the earlier existence of writing in the Near East.
Based on findings from Su and Samuels , visual complexity was indicated with the number of strokes rather than the number of stroke patterns.
The average number of strokes in the fewer-stroke condition was 6. The ratio of the numbers of strokes in the fewer-stroke condition over the number of strokes in the more-stroke condition 0.
In the with-radical condition, a high-frequency semantic radical was combined with one or more simple characters to form a pseudo-character that looks like a real character in structure but does not exist in Chinese. Table 1 illustrates an example of the pseudo-character from each condition. For example, consisted of a semantic radical which typically means bug, and a simple character which has no association with the meaning or the sound of the pseudo-character.
However, the pseudo- character still looks legal in structure as the semantic radical was located on the left side of the character as it is in real characters. Table 1.
Sample pseudo-characters used in the four experimental conditions of the character acquisition task. In the without-radical condition, a high-frequency semantic radical was combined with one or more simple character but the semantic radical was not positioned on the left. For instance, was considered a without-radical character because the semantic radical was located on the right side of the character and did not contribute to the meaning of the character. Radicals and simple characters were counter-balanced across the conditions to ensure that each radical appeared once in each of the four conditions i.
Simple characters were used more in the two conditions with characters that had more strokes than in the other two conditions with characters that had fewer strokes. However, the frequencies of the occurrences of each simple character were the same across the more-stroke conditions and fewer-stroke conditions, respectively.
Since, none of the pseudo-characters existed in Chinese, meanings for them were randomly assigned for the characters in the two without-radical conditions. In the two with-radical conditions, the pseudo-characters were assigned meanings related to their semantic radicals. For example, the assigned meaning of , a special way of singing , was associated with the meaning of the radical.
Having consulted the teachers and the students in a pilot study, the meaning assigned to each pseudo-character was ensured to be familiar to the participants. Pronunciations of the characters were randomly assigned in a way that no pseudo-characters included a phonetic component. In other words, the pronunciations of any of the pseudo-characters were not associated with any part of the characters. In order to accommodate the participants' class schedules, the experiments were conducted in four sessions where 12 pseudo-characters, three from each experimental condition, were introduced in each session.
Each session consisted of two phases, a study phase and a test phase, as described earlier. In order for all participants to receive the same instruction, instructions were pre-recorded by a native speaker of English using a SONY digital audio recorder and presented through PowerPoint presentation during the study phase. At the beginning of the PowerPoint presentation, participants were informed that the relationship between the pseudo-characters and their meanings would be the focus of the subsequent assessment.
They were also provided with a practice question illustrating how they would be assessed after the study phase. During the study phase, each pseudo-character was introduced on one slide with a picture that represented the character's meaning, along with the audio narration providing the definition of the character. Each session in the study phase lasted for approximately 11 min. The test phase examined how well the participants could recall the meanings of the pseudo-characters they had just studied in a multiple-choice tasks.
For each question, participants were asked to choose from four pictures the one that best represented the meaning of the pseudo-character. Radical awareness is a construct that consists of multiple facets: understandings of the forms of the radicals, the positional regularity, and their semantic category. The Chinese Orthographic Choice task involved two conditions: awareness of radical position and awareness of radical form.
In Kuo et al. Each item was composed of two pseudo-characters, and the participants were asked to indicate which of the two was more likely to be a real Chinese character. Visual Complexity and Radical Presence were the within-participant variables.
Table 2 presents the means and standard deviations of proportions correct on the character acquisition task. Table 2. Means and standard deviations of proportion correct on radical awareness and character acquisition measures. The hypothesis that the acquisition would be easier for characters with less visual complexity and with the presence of radicals was confirmed.
Participants scored significantly higher on characters with radicals than characters without radicals. To address the second research question, How radical awareness is related to the acquisition of Chinese characters varying in visual complexity and radical presence , correlational analysis was first performed among all measures.
The correlations among the character acquisition measures ranged from a moderate coefficient of 0. The hypothesis that radical awareness would be associated with the acquisition of Chinese characters with radicals but not characters without radicals, regardless of visual complexity, was not confirmed.
Correlational coefficients between the radical awareness and character acquisition measures ranged from 0. The correlations were slightly higher with the two with-radical conditions than those with the two without-radical conditions.
The present study shows that character properties have significant impact on the acquirability of the meaning of Chinese characters among beginning adolescent English-speaking learners of Chinese. First, in terms of visual complexity, the present study shows that characters with fewer strokes are generally easier to acquire than characters with more strokes. This finding is consistent with Kuo et al. The finding is also largely consistent with reaction-time-based studies on the processing of Chinese characters, which showed that characters with fewer strokes are recognized more rapidly than characters with more strokes e.
Drawing upon research on the visual complexity effect e. In other words, adult beginning learners of Chinese may have adopted a more analytical than holistic approach to processing unfamiliar Chinese characters and encoded unfamiliar characters stroke by stroke. Based on this encoding mechanism, the superior performance in the acquisition of characters with fewer strokes over those with more strokes can thus be explained in terms of limited working memory capacity: the more strokes a character has, the greater load it places on working memory, which limits the amount of working memory capacity available for associating a character with its corresponding meaning and for retaining such association.
It should be noted that the observed effect of visual complexity should not be generalized to the processing of high-frequency characters or characters learners are already familiar with. In the present study, the focus was more on the acquisition of the meaning of new characters and therefore all the stimuli used were novel characters. Hence, the observed effect of visual complexity may be limited to the processing of unfamiliar or low-frequency characters, but not familiar or high-frequency characters.
Presence of visual complexity effect on the processing of only unfamiliar or low-frequency stimuli has been consistently documented in existing literature on reading speed literature Jared and Seidenberg, ; Weekes, ; Ferrand, ; Juphard et al.
The observed effect of visual complexity with adolescent learners also complements findings from reaction-time-based research. Su and Samuels showed in a cross-sectional study that the effect of visual complexity on character judgment was present only among elementary school students, but not among middle school or university students.
Note that Kuo et al. Since, we adopted the same experimental procedures used in Kuo et al. Developmental differences in the effect of visual complexity may be more prominent in character judgment, as shown in Su and Samuels , but not in character acquisition, as shown in Kuo et al. Confirming such speculation requires simultaneous investigation of both character judgment and character acquisition across learners of development age groups, which is beyond the scope of the present study but a points to promising direction for future research.
With regard to the second character property examined in the present study, radical presence, the findings corroborate those from reaction-time-based Liu et al. The adolescent second language learners of Chinese in our study shared similar character acquisition process with the young native-Chinese readers.
Taking an analytical approach, our participants attended to the semantic radicals, and used radicals to infer and retain the meaning of new characters. This approach can be best explained by the Dual-Coding Theory Sadoski and Paivio, from a verbal—non-verbal perspective. According to Dual Coding Theory, meaningful learning of characters occurs through the association of the novel characters with the verbal definitions and non-verbal pictures. The experiment focused on matching the characters with the corresponding picture, which is a measure of meaningful verbal-to-nonverbal referential processing.
The use of both verbal and non-verbal codes as defined by Dual-Coding Theory thus plays a significant role in learning to recognize Chinese characters as well as to learning their meaning.
Somewhat interestingly, participants in our study had relatively low radical awareness as compared to the participants in Kuo et al. The means for the proportion correct on the radical awareness measure in Kuo et al. However, despite having more limited radical awareness, these adolescent second language learners of Chinese were able to decompose characters into informative semantic parts and utilize such knowledge in learning new characters.
In contrast to findings from Kuo et al. More specifically, radical presence was found to have a significant effect on students' performance regardless of whether the pseudo-characters had greater or less visual complexity.
The effect of visual complexity, however, was only significant for the characters without radicals, but not for those with radicals. These patterns were not detected in the present study with adolescent second language learners of Chinese.
Taken together, these findings suggest that for young beginning learners of Chinese, characters with radicals are more acquirable than characters without radicals regardless of the number of strokes; characters with fewer strokes are more acquirable than those with more strokes only when the characters do not contain any radicals.
However, for older beginning learners of Chinese, the effects of radical presence and visual complexity were independent. Such difference can be attributed to a combined effect of the differences in working memory and radical awareness between the participants in these two studies.
Participants in Kuo et al. However, they had more heightened radical awareness. Thus, when processing a character contains a radical, because of their relatively limited working memory, they were more likely to chunk the configurations of strokes into bigger components. Contrastively, in the present study, these older learners had greater working memory capacity but more limited radical awareness. Therefore, they were less likely to recognize the radicals but the greater working memory capacity allowed them to process the novel characters by strokes, which rendered the independence of these two factors in the present study.
Radical awareness was moderately correlated with the acquisition of all four types of characters. The significant correlations between radical awareness and the two without-radical conditions may appear somewhat unexpected at first glance. However, it should be noted that the pseudo-characters in the without-radical and the with-radical conditions shared the same stroke patterns and the only difference was that in the with-radical conditions, these stroke patterns served as radicals and contributed to the meaning of the characters whereas in the without-radical conditions, the same stroke patterns were positioned illegally as a radical and did not contribute to the meanings of the characters.
Given that the radical awareness measure used in the present study focused on radical form and radical positions, the assessed radical awareness could have potentially contributed to the acquisition of the characters in the without-radical conditions. This interpretation is also in agreement with two observations. First, the correlations with radical awareness, while all significant, were higher with the two with-radical conditions than with the two without-radical conditions.
Second, when the repeated measure analysis of variance was conducted with radical awareness as the covariate, the effect of radical presence became non-significant and the effect of visual complexity was weakened, despite being significant. Interestingly, although participants in the present study had much lower radical awareness, these observations are broadly consistent with findings in Kuo et al. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to systematically examine the relationship between individual learner differences in radical awareness and the acquisition of characters varying in visual complexity and radical presence among non-native Chinese-speaking learners.
This study has several limitations that warrant further investigation. First, as in Kuo et al. As noted earlier, the majority of the character reading research among beginning readers of Chinese has focused on character reading but not the acquisition of character meaning. However, because homophones are prevalent in Chinese, semantic aspects of character acquisition are likely to be more, if not equally, important than the phonetic aspects because successful phonetic decoding of a character does not always guarantee access to meaning Anderson and Li,
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