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Can you "read" by a glance? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4677 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 31 10 January 2012 at 1:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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As a native English speaker, I never look at the letters inside a word. I see the whole word as a single shape. In that respect it is no different than a Chinese character, except that it is a short, wide character instead of a square one.
For a short word example, consider the English words "dog" and "bog": 
You could even turn those into single characters, as long as someone knew how to read English I'll bet they could read these versions of "dog" and "bog" almost as fast: 
And every native English speaker can read this without any difficulty at all: I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! It's obvious that when we read this, we are not reading one letter at a time. On Edit: It also occurs to me that spelling with letters is more robust in the presence of errors. As the above example shows, even when there are multiple spelling errors, and even missing letters, the words can still be clearly understood. My guess is that if a Chinese character contained as many errors as any one of the English words above then it would not be recognizable. The built-in redundancy of alphabetic spelling makes it more self-correcting, and therefore more reliable. It makes English words more like holograms in that you can obliterate a portion of the word and the whole word is still readable. Not so with Chinese characters. --gary Edited by fiziwig on 10 January 2012 at 1:20am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4942 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 10 of 31 10 January 2012 at 1:22am | IP Logged | |||||
If I, as a native English speaker, glance at those two images, I see "Joy" and "Boy". R. == 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4677 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 31 10 January 2012 at 6:34am | IP Logged | |||||
You know what? I think you're right! Well, I guess I should have given more than 30 seconds of thought to creating the images then. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 31 10 January 2012 at 9:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Fiziwig just manages NOT to claim that "I cdnuolt blveiee taht ..." can be read just as fast as "I couldn't believe that...". If it were so there would be no idea in spell checking or in having rules for spelling at all, and chaos would reign. It is indeed amazing that a welltrained native (or advanced L2) reader can make sense in a text where each word is presented as a jumble of letters, but let's not commit the grave mistake of believing that this proves the irrelevancy of spelling. This feat is only possible with languages you know extremely well in their spoken and written form, and it is only possible because you normally get the words served with the letters in a fixed and standardized order. Just try to do the same with a language where you are a beginner, even though you may know the words in the chosen text.
The example with the 'graphical' distorted letters - and not least hrhenry's diverging reading of them - also shows that the brain is capable to to astounding feats of filling out and guessing in a difficult situation, but again this is based on the fact that fiziwig uses a wellknown language and very common words within this language. It is nice to know that you can draw on these resources, but those natives who are totally negligent about their spelling, grammar and even logic in their written productions are basically piggybacking on more conscientious fellow writers who give readers the materials which they need to train them in the faculties that makes it possible for them to survive the defective texts from the bad/lazy writers. I don't think that fiziwig wants us to write like his example, but in less extreme versions there is a tendency to excuse spelling errors etc. with the implied remark "u understan it so what is htere to conplain aobut?" Edited by Iversen on 10 January 2012 at 12:07pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6394 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 31 10 January 2012 at 10:56am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure the limiting factor is the amount of information the eye can see at one time, as opposed to the amount of information the brain can process. The eye can move pretty rapidly.If the limiting factor is in information- processing speed, Chinese characters have no advatage over alphabet-based systems. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lindseylbb Bilingual Triglot Groupie ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4744 days ago 92 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Cantonese*, English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 14 of 31 10 January 2012 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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1)What if is about how much you can get with a glance? No need to really understand the paragraph, just get the idea what is being presented, a quick scan, one page in two seconds. 2)I think if it's speed reading all languages are approximately the same. But again, I heard that if UN have some files in multiple languages, chinese one is always the thinest(shortest). Is that true? Does that mean something when comes to the comprehension speed? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4990 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 15 of 31 10 January 2012 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can see that Chinese translations of Harry Potter are much thinner than original
English. And I have seen some people saying that Chinese is faster to read. I cannot tell, of course, as I am not a native speaker, so my Chinese reading is slower obviously than the one of natives'. 'can you read at a glance?' I don't know... I've never though about it. but I am generally a slow reader. Edited by clumsy on 10 January 2012 at 5:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4677 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 31 10 January 2012 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
The ONLY claim I was trying to support is that skilled readers of alphabetic languages in general see the shape of the whole word "at a glance" rather than looking at each letter individually. I certainly do not mean to make any claim beyond that, and as for spelling, yes, it is important, but for a skilled reader, if the general shape of the word remains the same then that word can still be recognized "at a glance". Probably not quite as quickly as the properly spelled word, but still "at a glance". And, besides, I'm sure that any claimed advantage of Chinese writing could be duplicated by artistically combining the letters of English words into "characters", maybe something like: 
5 persons have voted this message useful |
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