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October 3, 2006
On Becoming Literate
Today I had lunch with two women who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The only thing unusual about this is that there were not three of them for our usual lunch on Tuesdays. Normally we talk about our families, discuss world events and gossip about whoever is unable to join us. Sometimes we even talk about the business that brings us together and provides me with part time employment. But today I asked them about learning to read and write Chinese. They both thought they could read and write their names by the time they were five or a little before. By six, they could read and write simple sentences. By the time they were twelve, they could read a newspaper and recognize 2000 to 3000 signs, perhaps many more. They had no idea of how many characters they now knew but guessed it was in the range of 10,000 to 20,000. Of course, they were guessing at these numbers but both thought the general range was correct. According to Wikipedia, the government of China lists a person as literate if they have knowledge of 2000 characters and that there are about 47,035 signs in the standard Chinese dictionary.
Two things are interesting about this. First, the pace of learning is almost exactly the same as it was for my wife, my children and me. And we only needed to learn 26 "characters" but we did have to develop a speaking and reading vocabulary of about the same size as the number of Chinese characters my friends had to learn. They both were of the opinion that learning to read and write alphabetic English was much easier than learning to read and write Chinese. They attributed this to the phonetic nature of the writing system. But, as I pointed out, they both were already literate in Chinese when they started learning to read and write English. Their own children are progressing at about the same pace with reading and writing English (and in one case both English and Chinese) as they did and as my children and I did. Their children are perhaps a year more advanced than they were but no more.
Second, Labat's Manuel d'Épigraphie Akkadienne has 598 base Akkadian signs. To be sure, many of these signs were used in multiple ways even in the same dialect of Akkadian. But not all of them were used in any one dialect. A sign that must be read as a syllable in one context may need to be read as an ideogram in another and a phonetic determinative in still another. I know from personal experience that it is hard to learn them and hard to remember them and their various usages. After all, that is why my copy of Labat is so very worn-out. But it is hard for me to believe that becoming literate in Akkadian was any harder than becoming literate in Chinese. To be sure, I haven't tried to become literate in Chinese or in any meaningful way in Akkadian either.
All this is very far from a scientific study but I can't help but think that literacy involves a lot more than the complexity of the writing system. In fact, I think that many other cultural issues are far more important than complexity of the writing system when it comes to individual or widespread literacy.
Posted by Duane Smith at October 3, 2006 6:52 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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