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#Post#: 16386--------------------------------------------------
Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Irena Date: June 2, 2019, 5:10 am
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Here's an article (by Helen Abadzi) I've long thought about:
HTML https://en.unesco.org/news/helen-abadzi-perils-childhood-illiteracy?language=fr<br
/>
The main point is that there seems to be a "sensitive period"
for literacy acquisition. Adults are capable of learning
individual letters, but attaining automaticity in reading seems
to be very difficult. This is why adult literacy programs give
such disappointing results, even when students persist (attend
regularly and don't drop out). In contrast, little educated
adults who nonetheless learned to read as children can improve
their reading skills very significantly with practice.
For us as language learners, though, this this is the most
interesting part:
[quote]And it is not just unschooled adults who read
laboriously. Educated foreigners learning languages that have
unknown scripts experience the same difficulties. "Western"
academics and aid workers who spend decades in Ethiopia or
Bangladesh may speak very fluently but perpetually read like
mid-first graders. They report seeing a jumble of letters that
must be decoded one by one. Reading is thus too tedious, and
many avoid it.[/quote]
This reminds me of my experience with Hebrew. I took two years
of college-level Hebrew when I was in my late 20s, and despite
the fact that Hebrew orthography is highly consistent
(phonetic), especially when nikkud (those dots and dashes that
represent vowels) is present, I remained a painfully slow
reader. I originally assumed it was because my Hebrew sucked,
but now I think something else was going on. Otherwise, how do
you explain the fact that the day I started learning German and
then Czech, I could already "decode" (i.e. sound out written
words without necessarily understanding their meaning) faster
than I could decode Hebrew after two years of study?
One more remark: in her talk at the Polyglot Conference, Abadzi
mentioned that if you know the Roman script, learning Cyrillic
or Greek in adulthood shouldn't be too bad because of the
similarities of the scripts. But learning something legitimately
different (such as Devanagari or Arabic) is a problem. You can
certainly learn individual letters, but then you're perpetually
stuck with a very low reading speed.
What's been your experience with learning new scrips in
adulthood?
Here's the link to Abadzi's Polyglot Conference talk (the
relevant part starts at 44min 50sec):
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-1oHIneSNw
#Post#: 16392--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Alharacas Date: June 2, 2019, 7:02 am
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Yikes, Irena! From my perspective, this thread should have been
titled "Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss", because halfway
through the article you linked to, I started shrieking and
rending my clothes.
So that's why I consistently avoid doing my reading/writing
exercises. Even though my lovely and incredibly helpful Persian
language partner is keeping me otherwise wonderfully motivated
by saying nice (if largely untrue) things about my pronunciation
and ability to have micro-conversations with her in Farsi.
(lightbulb) (sigh)
"Thick or abundant books are indispensable for the
‘face’-recognition competency to develop. They should use
letters that are large and spaced to accommodate the brain’s
visual demands."
Oh yes! That's definitely contributing to my problems. If skype
permitted Ctrl+, and if the Farsi exercises in my book weren't
written in exactly the same minuscule script as the rest, I'd be
so much more willing to try and decipher at least the occasional
word - or so I tell myself.
I'm sorry, I haven't got the time to watch the entire video
right now (will do so later), but does she say anything about
whether automatic reading skills are at all attainable in a
foreign script learned as an adult? (I did read the article, but
she doesn't really say anything definite about it in there, does
she?)
#Post#: 16395--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Irena Date: June 2, 2019, 7:27 am
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@Alharacas
Here's an excerpt from a scholarly article
(
HTML https://www.academia.edu/3245837/Does_age_diminish_the_ability_to_learn_fluent_reading)<br
/>that Abadzi wrote on the topic:
[quote]How much practice is needed in various ages before
automaticity is achieved? The few anecdotal reports of fluent
readers (such as foreign priests who read mass every day in a
non-Latin script and a missionary who has read Bangla for 45
years) imply that effortless reading may eventually be
achievable. On the other hand, reports of persons in
mid-adulthood (such as an American professor of Bangla, who has
read it almost daily for 26 years) indicate continued slow
performance despite large amounts of reading. More discouraging
is a report by a middle-aged American professor of Russian who
started studying Russian at 17. The Cyrillic and Latin alphabets
have several letters in common, yet this professor still finds
Russian (written in Cyrillic) slower to read than Polish (which
he knows less well than Russian). It is possible that the amount
of practice needed to perceive patterns that will make the
phonological processor work efficiently increases with age until
automaticity becomes impossible to achieve. [/quote]
I don't know about you, but I find that rather discouraging. She
doesn't even guestimate the number of hours needed, but to me,
it sounds like an adult would need thousands upon thousands of
hours of practice in order to reach the reading speed of a
typical 4th grader. ::gulp::
#Post#: 16399--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Alharacas Date: June 2, 2019, 7:34 am
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Discouraging, Irena? I should bl...inding well say so.
(tearing out hair)
#Post#: 16400--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Nikola Date: June 2, 2019, 8:14 am
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I haven't tried learning any new scripts in the past 15 years or
so, so I can't really comment. I was toying with the idea of
giving Japanese a try. I wonder if scripts that don't have a
character for each vowel/consonant and you have no choice but to
decipher them as whole words, would be easier to learn (sorry, I
only read the article, didn't get to watch the video, it might
be explained there).
#Post#: 16405--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: NealC Date: June 2, 2019, 9:33 am
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I don't think Kanji is too bad - isn't that the one where every
Japanese sound has a character, and words/sentences are built
using the characters?
Too bad Sofia hasn't seen this, I remember her describing Arabic
script as very difficult, especially in different font sizes.
I didn't understand the title to this section at first, in
psychology a "script" is a different concept.
#Post#: 16406--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Irena Date: June 2, 2019, 9:35 am
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@Nikola
The relevant part of the video is only about 5min long (starting
at 44:50). She addresses Japanese in particular with just one
sentence (at 46:10). She says that Kanji has the property that
you either know the character or you don't, but with Katakana
and Hiragana, you have all the same problems as with other
alphabets/syllabaries.
(Warning: speculation ahead.) This does make me wonder, though,
whether Chinese characters might not, paradoxically, be more
adult-friendly than alphabets and syllabaries. Sure, the initial
time investment required for learning Chinese characters is
quite huge, but if you do make that investment, perhaps you
really do become a fluent reader, whereas if you'd invested a
comparable amount of time and effort into reading in a more
"sensibly" written language (such as Korean) you'd still be
decoding at first grade speed. Anyway, that's all speculation.
But I do wonder.
#Post#: 16407--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Irena Date: June 2, 2019, 9:38 am
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[quote author=NealC link=topic=1125.msg16405#msg16405
date=1559486011]
Too bad Sofia hasn't seen this, I remember her describing Arabic
script as very difficult, especially in different font sizes.
[/quote]
Right! I'd love to know what she thinks.
#Post#: 16408--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Nikola Date: June 2, 2019, 10:15 am
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[quote author=Irena link=topic=1125.msg16406#msg16406
date=1559486152]
@Nikola
The relevant part of the video is only about 5min long (starting
at 44:50). She addresses Japanese in particular with just one
sentence (at 46:10).
[/quote]
Ah! So she does. Thanks. Kanji shouldn't be too bad, then. And
you might even be right about Chinese characters possibly being
more adult-friendly. It will also be individual to some extent
because the combinations of different spoken languages and their
scripts will require slightly different skills (or maybe the
same skills but in different proportions, if you see what I
mean) and the ability to read them will depend in great part on
talent.
This is something we used with one slightly more able class I've
worked with (the only one where children were learning to read).
We used Widgit symbols over words to make them read words whole
rather than letter by letter.
[img width=300
height=113]
HTML http://www.cateonline.co.uk/askability_pack/web/images/symbols/widgit_symbols_clip_image002.jpg[/img]
#Post#: 16410--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning new scripts in adulthood
By: Alharacas Date: June 2, 2019, 10:24 am
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Many of you probably know this, but for those of you who don't -
from a European learner's point of view, the fundamental problem
with reading both Arabic and (to a slightly lesser extent) Farsi
are the "missing" vowels, i.e. the fact that they're mostly not
written.
Anybody who's ever tried to learn Spanish will know that even
without knowing any Spanish words at all, you'd be able to read
out loud the most complicated text, and you'd be understood.
Provided you'd learnt the utterly consistent pronunciation
rules, of course.
Arabic and Farsi are totally different.
Take the Farsi word for "man", مرد, spelled
(from right to left) M - R - D. You need to know it's pronounced
almost like the French word for sh*t, "merde", because it's not
obvious at all from the way it's spelled. It might just as well
be pronounced "mered", "marad", "merd" or "mared".
Actually, for all I know, these words do exist and I'm simply
not advanced enough to have come across them. In which case
you'd have the added joy of having to figure out from context
whether this combination of letters is supposed to mean "man"
and is pronounced accordingly, or whether it's an entirely
different word, pronounced with one or more different vowel
sounds.
This is on top of me needing a magnifying glass to read
normal-size Persian letters. ;D
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