If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago, as both cannot be read phonetically.
“It deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
This is something I’ve heard (and read, somewhat) about, but I’m not real up on - what are the pluses v. minuses re: phonics?
You don’t read the whole kanji at first, as I understand it. You look at one sector of it, then another, then another, and gradually dial in toward the accurate meaning. It’s a puzzle. later on, as you recognize that kanji again, you may reach whole word familiarity with it, but your first go at a new kanji is definitely step-by-step.
(At least that’s my understanding from my daughter who has taken Japanese in high school and college. I’d say she knows about 500 kanji, and must piece her way through the others as best she can.)
“If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago, as both cannot be read phonetically.”
the difference is that every stroke in every pictogram in those languages has a story behind it, usually a story that is hundreds and often thousands of years old ... students must learn a lengthy history of those stories to learn to read and write ...
also a non-phonetic language like that is a HUGE disadvantage as there are several hundred spoken languages in China and so there are hundreds of different pronunciations for each character ... when i traveled china forty years ago at the behest of the PRC, we always traveled with a cadre of professional tour guides and at ever different major city we would have to acquire a local translator because the tour guides from Beijing couldn’t speak the local lingoes ...
Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabaries, so yes Japan embraces phonetic alphabets.
Kanji is whole word but it isn’t used as much and people spend their whole lives learning...maybe a third of it.
” If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago ...”
That is of course very incorrect and very stupid.
Languages are not dependent on written expression.
The entire point of an alphabet is to not use pictograms.
Any of the “glyph” scripts were intended to keep the general populace illiterate.
Bruce and I have worked on fixing my kids reading issues and his works at American Thinker were a resource for me in dealing with the school administrators who were not willing to to jettison whole word reading.
Using phonics I (with Bruce’s help) turned both of my kids into avid readers. they were both significantly behind, and are now ahead of their peers in reading. Bruce was a great help. His articles in AT gave me the ammunition I needed to force them to use phonics programs and we turned my kids around from being a full grade level and 1-1/2 grade levels behind to a full grade level ahead for both of my boys.