(no subject)

[owlectomy]

One of my persistent questions about learning to read Chinese is about how literacy develops. In English there are "easy reader" books that have a restricted amount of vocabulary, and English is phonetic enough so that you can mostly get by sounding stuff out. In Japanese, children's manga and children's chapter books have extensive furigana pronunciation guides, so it's no big deal if there's a kanji you haven't learned yet. But when I looked at the Chinese translations of Beverly Cleary or Laura Ingalls Wilder at the library... that's a lot of hanzi, and without any pinyin or zhuyin to tell you how to pronounce them. There are some children's books with pinyin or zhuyin, but they're harder to find than I'd expect.

Well, here is what my research found:

In Japan, you get taught 640 characters in school by the end of the fourth year of primary school.

In Taiwan, it's about 1600. In mainland China, it's about 2400. (This is from Him Cheung and Lisa K. H. Ng in Reading Development in Chinese Children edited by Catherine McBride-Chang and Hsuan-Chih Chen).

Well that would explain it. It seems like books for middle-grade kids require an almost-adult level of literacy because middle-grade kids actually have an almost-adult level of literacy. (I think you need about 3000 characters for full literacy, but 1600 will get you to 95% comprehension.)

Not sure what implications that has for my studying, unless "study reading for 45-90 minutes a day like in Chinese schools" is a viable option (NO.)

Comments

[laughingrat]

Wow goddamn. 0_o

[oyceter]

I feel slightly less inadequate now for how difficult it was for me to read "kid" books?

Also this is bringing back memories of hanzi study throughout my time in Taiwan and learning how to use Chinese dictionaries and etc.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

How much slop-over, for lack of a more elegant term, do you find between kanji and hanzi? When I started trying to read Chinese, I realized that there were a bunch of Japanese characters I'd never got down exactly ie well enough to be able to write them, not just 'read in context', and they were screwing with my ability to remember Chinese ones that looked close but not quite. I assumed if I'd ever passed the kanji part of JLPT ikkyuu, the Japanese form would be fixed and the Chinese variant wouldn't be a problem. Evidently not?

Is the problem with simplified hanzi, or differing meanings between the two languages, or what?

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of carry-over, but the big problem with that is that I'm mostly trying to read as a way of bootstrapping my speaking/listening skills -- even if I understand what something means, I don't want to gloss over not knowing the pronunciation and tones. If I wasn't worried about that it would be a lot easier.

And the differences between simplified hanzi and traditional hanzi and kanji are kind of a pain, but that's mostly because I end up reading a mix of simplified and traditional stuff depending on what's available to me.