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

Joachim Pense wrote:

Most of the 214 Kangxi radicals are signific in the characters. The
remaining parts of the character is phonetic. Thus, when I encounter
a character with the "fish" radical, and context tells me that it's
the name of a fish species, I'll not bother with the pronunciation.
That character is just a visual sign for that name, whose
pronunciation remains unknown to me. I can continue with reading the
rest of the text, seeing this fish name used repeatedly, without
knowing how to pronounce this fish name. What's wrong with that?

(In extreme cases, it may turn out that this character has NO
pronunciation in Chinese, because it is a Japanese-coined character,
which only has proper pronunciation in Japanese. In other words,
that's not a Chinese character. It's a Japanese one. But that
doesn't hurt my comprehension of the text at all. After all, that
character is just a visual sign to me.)

Does that mean you read on a purely visual level without any
subvocalizing? Or will you put some sort of "stub-word" (like, say
"some-kind-of-fish" into your subvocalizing stream?

I don't think his example is far-fetched. I find myself doing simple visual recognition of alphabetic words even in cases when a little effort (or no effor at all) would give me the pronunciation. It tends to be the normal thing to do whenever the word in question has no informative value per se other than being itself - i.e., not another. An example might be some chemical name in a situation where I'm not interested in the compound itself, or, while reading the news, spokespeople's names. I should add it's not out of disrespect.
If the need to communicate them in spoken form arises, oftentimes some approximation rather than a proper pronunciation will do.
As far as subvocalising streams are concerned, I don't think anything remotely meaningful is inserted there. At best, a very crude approximation, perhaps taking only the first syllable into account, but not really necessary.
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