“no English words end with the letters i, u, v and j?”
Hmm, I wonder what the etymology of the word “you” is then.
Which is plainly evident across cyberspace, and even here on Free Republic.
I was reading the comments section of a Jackie Evancho video on YouTube last night, and the spelling and grammar of many of the posters was nearly unreadable.
Please keep in mind that Chinese characters come in one form only (no UPPER CASE, lower case, script, exotic typefaces, etc.) Also, they often have pictorial components that make them easier to recall; English words are extremely difficult to recall as visual symbols.
Second, there are far fewer characters for the average person to deal with. (We say: “If you don’t have your ticket, you can’t get your laundry.” They in effect say; “No ticket, no laundry.” Only 3 characters.)
I’ve read that only the smartest Chinese have a sight-vocabulary of over 20,000 characters. But in English you need 100,000 words to be at the same level of literacy. It’s never going to happen except for Rain Man.
Ordinary American students actually seem to top out at 500-1000 Sight Words. They are classed as functional illiterates. This is the reason for Eide’s statistics that 2/3 of American children aren’t good readers.
Yes, but if I understand it correctly, even those pictograms share certain root syllable/symbols within them. Each and every symbol/word is not necessarily unique. It's not exactly phonetic but not exclusively whole word either. Can anyone here verify this for me?
Coincidentally, I JUST got back from Target with Phase 1 of Hooked on Phonics for my 4 year old daughter. :)
And you wonder why there are Asian Tiger Mothers with the idea that learning is long, slow hard work?
Given a couple of billion [2bn] “1 in 100” is 20 Million.
They are learning pictographs ( a simplified picture of an object). The clues for the meaning of the object is found within the simplified picture ( pictograph). Just as deaf children learn sign language of thousands of words, Asian children can learn the “signs” of their written language because the signs ( pictographs) of their written language actually LOOK like the real object.
A pictograph of an Asian word for “house” actually resembles a **house**! Therefore, is it easier to learn. Our English word, H*o*u*s*e*, looks nothing like a real house found on the child's street and therefore there is absolutely no clue in the shape of this word to prompt the memory.
By the way,...I suggest that you do a little research on how our alphabet came to be. Many of the letters at one time were pictographs for actual objects. The first sound of the word of the object then became the sound of what later became a letter in our alphabet.
By the way...I think and interesting study would be to compare the reading abilities of Asian children in Asia who are born deaf to those children in U.S. who are born deaf. Since the Asian pictograph symbols actually resemble the object, my bet is that Asian deaf children have a much better success in learning to read their pictograph-based written language.