Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?

"Sébastien" == Sébastien de Mapias <sglrigaud@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Sébastien> (in China and elsewhere...) Hi again,

Sébastien> 1/ So given the extreme difference between our
Sébastien> alphabet(s) and the "sinogrammes" (is there a word
Sébastien> equivalent in English ?), how many years of school do
Sébastien> the Chinese pupils spend learning their writing system
Sébastien> ??

In Hong Kong, schoolchildren can alreay read and write simple texts
and letters by the time of grade 3 (about 9 years of age). And upon
finishing primary school (grade 6, age 12), they can already read
newspapers and novels without problems.


Sébastien> Are there thousands of characters *only*,

No. There are tends of thousands, if you check the Kangxi dictionary.


Sébastien> or are we talking about tens of thousands of characters
Sébastien> to retain ??

No. Some analysis found that an adult knows around 6000 characters
(which is also what one achieves upon finishing primary school), and
can actively use around 3000-4000 of them.


Now, I ask you a similar question about French/English: how many
*morpheme* do you know? How many *morpheme* are there in these
languages? Your question about no. of characters is as difficult to
answer as these questions. Each character is a morpheme. And thanks
to the irregular spellings of English and French, you have to learn
the spellings of each morpheme, too. Is that a big difference? I
don't think so. The difference is quite superficial.


Sébastien> Pretty early in France (after 4 or 5 years if I
Sébastien> correctly remember) we start doing class written
Sébastien> assignments (that we call "dissertations"), is there
Sébastien> any stage during their schooling where young Chinese
Sébastien> can do the same ?!?

I started composition in Chinese at grade 3. But I also started
writing personal, informal letters at grade 1.


Sébastien> 2/ I read there are 214 keys: do ALL characters contain
Sébastien> one of these ? Or there are exceptions ??

These are called "radicals". And by definition, every character has
to contain one of them. Some of the radicals are 'dedicated' to just
one or a few characters. Putting it the other way around, those
radicals are made "radicals" so as to fulfill the rule: every
character contains a radical.

BTW, the no. of radicals depends on orthographic conventions. 214 is
the number used in the Kangxi dictionary. Other dictionaries may
differ, although most follow the well accepted convention established
by Kangxi.


Sébastien> 3/ Let's say I'm a 30-year old Chinese, quietly
Sébastien> listening my favorite radio/TV station: suddenly the
Sébastien> speaker uses a syllable/word I've never heard before:

That occurs frequently. We have new words from time to time. This is
especially true for Cantonese, where new slangs come and go very
quickly.


Sébastien> how will I manage to find it in my dictionary (which is
Sébastien> a good one but does not contain pinyin entries;

In Chinese, new words are usually made by compounding existing
morphemes. So, the characters used are obvious.



Sébastien> by the way, do Chinese dictionaries have pinyin
Sébastien> references ?) ??

Only recent ones published for Mandarin-capable people. Pinyin is
useless when one has to look up an unfamiliar character he has
encountered upon reading.

Traditional dictionaries use the 214 (more or less) radicals as an
indexing mechanism. Since it is based on the shape of a the
character, you don't need to know the pronunciation of it a priori.



Sébastien> 4/ The other way: I'm reading my favorite newspaper,
Sébastien> and here I stumble against a character I've never seen
Sébastien> before: how can I read it aloud ??

Why bother about reading it aloud? We can often guess the meaning
from the signific parts of the character. And that's already enough
for reading comprehension. Why bother about pronunciation?


Sébastien> How can I know how to pronounce it ??

If you really need to know the pronunciation, you use traditional
dictionaries to look up the character. But most people don't bother
to waste such time. Just like an English speaker trying to guess what
"gouvernement" on a news headline of a French newspaper means. He may
have guessed "government" owing to the similarity in spelling, even
though he has no idea how a Frenchman would pronounce that French
word. If he's not studying French, he won't even bother to find out
the pronunciation of this French word. (How many English speakers can
pronounce the loan word "deja-vu" the French way? And do they care?)

The pitfall of this example lies in that there is a spelling
similarity between "government" and "gouvernement". For Chinese, the
clues are not in spelling, but in the components of a character.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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