Does it take longer for Chinese children to attain reading comprehension?

[Scoobyqueen]

Compared to children whose mother tonque uses the roman alphabet for reading, does it takes Chinese children longer to (learn to) understand what they are reading? I am wondering about this, since it obviously takes them longer to learn characters than it does to learn the alphabet. This may or may not influence reading comprehension, ie you can look characters up in the same way that you can look up western words up in a dictionary. If it indeed does take longer to learn to read and understand Chinese and since a large amount of time is invested in learning characters, how do Chinese children attain a similar educational level to their western peers in other subjects, ie they will be spending a significant amount of time learning characters and learning to read and comprehend, when perhaps western children spend that time learning other subjects, partly also through reading up on it themselves?

[gato]

Yes, but Chinese children spend more time studying, so it all evens out. Poor Chinese children....

[muyongshi]

I'm trying to remember the exact phrasing of a post by either Skylee or Studentyoung (if it was someone else sorry for my ... ummm... what's the word... alzhiemers, yeah that's it) that stated in effect the amount of time that primary students spend on learning the foundations of Chinese in reading in writing was in effect the same amount of time spent in the States on it. The methodology and process to get their was more the difference. If my poor memory serves me correctly it was up till second grade and at that point the learning process became more of a osmotic type learning.

I will keep looking for that post but the point being that the amount of time really isn't that different.

[gato]

It was Quest. He was exaggerating slightly to argue that characters aren't that hard to learn. In addition to the 30 minutes copying characters each day, it requires a bit more classroom time and lots of homework, including quite a bit of copying texts from the book. A Chinese elementary school's day ends around 4pm and there is usually two to three hours of homework every day, and more than that as you get into the higher grades.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=157740#post157740

I don't know how many times this has to be repeated... intensive character learning was only the first 3 years of elementary school. After that, we just picked up characters passively. But even during that time, I was in the school's swimming team, chorus, and still getting 100's on exams, still had time to gather with friends afterschool and on weekends to play street games and video games. So I don't know what these people are talking about that Chinese characters take up too much of a kid's time. It never took more than half an hour each day for me to copy the 10 or so characters 10 times each, and they stuck ever since. It's as though, laowais knew better than us who actually went through this period as kids. It was this same laowai/elitist mentality that caused the unecessary simplification in the 50s; some smart屁屁 thought other people couldn't learn what they had learned themselves, i.e., traditional characters.

[muyongshi]

Ok thanks.

But the difference in time it takes is still minimal. When you consider the overall spread of time that is spent in the education process, whether it is 2nd grade for westerners and 3rd grade for Chinese, yeah it's longer but not long enough to base an argument such as this off of.

[gato]

But the difference in time it takes is still minimal. When you consider the overall spread of time that is spent in the education process, whether it is 2nd grade for westerners and 3rd grade for Chinese,

But first and second graders don't have homework in the US.... When I went to the US in the 5th/6th grade, we still had virtually no homework. It's night and day between Chinese and American elementary schools.

[muyongshi]

Well, I had homework. From kindergarten and granted the amount overall was not comparable to chinese students, my kindergarten to 2nd grade homework was pretty much all writing practice.

[Lugubert]

Chinese children are exposed to writing long before they know what it is. And homework or not in school, they have writing all around them all the time. Learning a 汉字 will of course be easier if you've seen it a thousand times before having to learn its meaning. And this will be in the days when they still have the capacity for "learning by osmosis"

That said, I think it was the late John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy who referred to some experiment in which kids who were taught pinyin could produce intelligible (mixed) written notes way earlier than 汉字 only children.

[HedgePig]

It seems that Chinese kids spend a lot more time at school and doing homework than their Western counterparts but I'm not sure that this is caused by more time being required to learn to read and write. Any Chinese person I've spoken to who has young children feels that when they were younger they spent less time at school and certainly much less time doing homework and they still managed to learn to read and write.

I've also noticed that the my own two children (one at school in China and one still in kindergarten) have picked up reading Chinese a little before reading English. I think that this is because reading an alphabetic script has an extra step - you have to learn the sounds that the combination of letters makes and this is not a trivial step. With a Chinese character, once you recognise it, you immediately have the word.

Edited May 28, 2009 at 12:11 AM by HedgePig
clarification

[roddy]

That said, I think it was the late John DeFrancis in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy who referred to some experiment in which kids who were taught pinyin could produce intelligible (mixed) written notes way earlier than 汉字 only children.

I don't have the book, and couldn't track down the actual passage on Google Books, but if I recall correctly, the youngest of Chinese students who were still using pinyin were ahead of their American counterparts on some measure, as pinyin is easier to learn than English spelling. However once characters were introduced they fell behind. I may have that wrong, no doubt someone with the actual book will be along shortly.

you have to learn the sounds that the combination of letters makes and this is not a trivial step. With a Chinese character, once you recognise it, you immediately have the word.

'once you recognise it' isn't a trivial step either . .

[gato]

If it indeed does take longer to learn to read and understand Chinese and since a large amount of time is invested in learning characters, how do Chinese children attain a similar educational level to their western peers in other subjects, ie they will be spending a significant amount of time learning characters and learning to read and comprehend, when perhaps western children spend that time learning other subjects, partly also through reading up on it themselves?

The answer the OP's original question is that though it does take more time to recognize Chinese CHARACTERS, the vast majority of time will be devoted to learn WORDS and the underlying subject. The time spent on characters is small in the overall education process.

The requirements set by China's Ministry of Education for elementary schools (see below) show that a student:

- by the 2rd grade, should be able recognize 1800 characters and write 1200

- by the 4th grade, should be able recognize 2500 characters and write 2000

- by the 6th grade, should be able recognize 3000 characters and write 2500.

http://bbs.baby.sina.com.cn/treeforum/App/view.php?tbid=1343&bbsid=171&subid=1&fid=355818&id=14120

2000年3月教育部制订并颁布了《九年义务教育全日制小学语文教学大纲（试用修订版）》，对小学识字、写字教学总的要求是：

低年级（一二年级）的要求是：

2.认识常用汉字1800个左右，其中1200个左右会写

中年级（三四年级）的要求是：

2.认识常用汉字2500个左右。其中2000个左右会写

高年级（五六年级）的要求是：

2.认识常用汉字3000个左右。其中2500个左右会写

With 2500 characters, a 4th graders should be able to recognize almost all characters in a daily newspaper. And with 3000 characters, a 6th grader should be able to recognize almost all characters in a college textbook. The difficulty to comprehension would be with words, sentence structure, logic, and the underlying subjects. Characters is not a big obstacle.

An additional point is that the fact that Chinese words are made of characters might actually make learning words in Chinese be more efficient than in English because the characters give clue to the meaning of the words. Knowing the meaning of characters help you guess the meaning of new words. It's akin to knowing Latin and Greek roots would help one in learning words in English and other European languages more efficiently.

[roddy]

An additional point is that the fact that Chinese words are made of characters might actually make learning words in Chinese be more efficient than in English because the characters give clue to the meaning of the words. Knowing the meaning of characters help you guess the meaning of new words. It's akin to knowing Latin and Greek roots would help one in learning words in English and other European languages more efficiently.

Offset the disadvantage of not being able to reliably sound out written words you haven't seen before to match them up with words you have heard before though.

I suspect the answer is in this book, but I reached my viewing limit before finding it.