Automatic reading versus the other kind (warning: long and boring!)

[Guest realmayo]

我很想去阳朔

I've been thinking a bit about reading Chinese and how I find it difficult. In the above sentence, when I read the first four characters I understand the meaning directly: just looking at them I understand them, whether I want to or not. The last two characters are different: I have to stop, work out the characters (阳 is pretty easy but I still have to think about it for a second which I'm sure I wouldn't do if I saw it as part of a word I know well such as 太阳), dredge up the pronunciation of 朔 or, failing that, remind myself of the kind of pronunciations that you get with 塑 versus the similar 逆 or 厥, then either remember that this is the word for the place Yangshuo, or piece it together by the sound and finally then work it out and remember.

(I think 阳朔 here is a convenient example, but by no means is this limited to place names -- for me it's the same for all kinds of vocab. And obviously, after writing all this I, for now at least, read/understand 阳朔 immediately.)

The reason I'm posting is because this morning I started reading a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize in Economics for work on psychology: here's what stood out for me in the first chapter:

Answer to 2 + 2 = ?

Read words on large billboards

Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master)

Detect that one object is more distant than another

Orient to the source of a sudden sound

Make a "disgust face" when shown a horrible picture

All these are things that happen automatically: well, the last three happen automatically to almost everyone, the first three only happen automatically once you've spent lots and lots time in the past doing maths, learning how to read, playing chess etc. But the point is that once you have, it's automatic and involuntary: you can't really not think 4 if you see 2 + 2 = ?.

Compare this with:

17 x 24

He asks the reader to work out the answer (in your head).

He then says: "You experienced slow thinking [versus the "fast thinking" in the earlier examples] as you proceeded through a sequence of steps …. Carrying out the computation was a strain. You felt the burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you were and of where you were going … The computation was not only an event in your mind; your body was also involved. Your muscles tensed up, your blood pressure rose, and your heart rate increased." Again, the maths question is just an example: he gives lots of other non-maths ones too.

Personally I find all this stuff interesting in itself (the writer's big idea is that we have two ways of thinking: the intuitive effortless automatic but sometimes surprisingly fallible one, and a slow, logical, one that requires our full attention), but it struck me that this is what happens when I'm reading Chinese: I'm constantly cycling through two different ways of reading -- the first one where I understand parts of a sentence without trying, and the second one where I have to make a real effort, holding various material in place at the same time, and so on. I don't actually enjoy it!

I'm sure this is true of anyone reading a foreign language: even in an abc language someone coming across the word "extraordinarily" may break it down into three or four parts before remembering exactly what it means. But I think it's worse with Chinese because of the extra steps involved in deciphering a little-remembered character, and also because of compression and no word-boundaries, just one character after another.

Okay, so all I'm saying is that reading is difficult for people learning Chinese, which is hardly news! So sorry to anyone who's still reading.... I just wanted to post because the beginning of this book seems to explain so well what it is that makes me find reading Chinese difficult -- & I especially liked the bit about the body's response. Anyone got any thoughts?

[roddy]

I think you're right. I read the book recently myself, and there were a number of points relevant to language learning. I (and I'm sure most people on here) like to think that 'people can understand me if they try' isn't a good enough standard for language learners. If you read the book and think about the cognitive effort that that 'trying' involves for your interlocutor, and the knock-on effect that'll have on how much energy they have to think about what you're actually talking about, you can see why.

I guess it's one of those things that sounds like common sense (people who are fed up listening to bad Chinese won't be so helpful) but it's nice to have it explained a bit.

[anonymoose]

There's a fundamental difference between 2+2 and 17×24, and that is that you have heard 2+2 so many times before that you remember the answer without actually having to go through any calculation in your mind. How about 10×10? I don't think the calculation involved is necessarily any easier than 17×24, assuming you had to actually calculate it, but again, most likely you know the answer straight away, because you already have the answer in memory.

Well, guess what? Reading Chinese (or any language, for that matter) is the same. Lack of familiarity means you have to decipher each character one by one. But after you have built up enough familiarity, you will be able to recognise words straight away from memory without going through any steps of interpretation. So, what it boils down to simply is practice, practice and more practice. Good luck.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes I think I addressed that in the post but I don't blame you for not trawling through all of it! As I said though, for me this way of looking at how the mind works gets at the heart of why reading Chinese is particularly difficult for learners, versus say French, Vietnamese, Korean etc etc. And I like Roddy's angle of how it's revevant to listening to someone speak your langauge poorly too.

So, what it boils down to simply is practice, practice and more practice.

Ah but what kind of practice? Things are never that simple ....

[skylee]

Re #3, 熟能生巧。

[animal world]

One of the things i find so difficult about reading Chinese is that i am confronted with a dense blob of Chinese characters on a page. It looks very intimidating. In English, particularly in modern fiction, the spatial relationship between the words and the page is very important. It helps the reader to absorb the words without much effort. Just open any mystery novel and you will see that a high percentage is devoted to dialog. It goes something like this:

"Is that really true?"

"Absolutely."

"I just can't believe it!"

"Trust me, I'm telling you the truth."

My apologies for the trite dialog but you probably found it much easier to read/take in than the first sentence of the preceding paragraph which probably has about the same number of words than this dialog. When you're reading the left page of a book and your eyes noticed that there's a dialog on the right side, i.e. many short sentences and lot's more blank space, your eyes are looking forward to reaching that dialog and get a bit of a rest. I have a Kindle and one of the things i don't like about it is that i can't see what's in store on the next few pages. And this is a subtle, psychological thing but i know it's there. It's also one of the reasons why it takes more effort to read books from, say, the 19th century or to read non-fiction. They have more descriptive language, i.e. long sentences.

In English, as in so many other languages, the language offers the readers helpful markers in the form of commas, emdashes, semi colons, (shortish) paragraphs, etc. They are useful hints toward comprehending the reading material and tell your eyes where they can take a rest without it interfering with understanding the sentence. In Chinese there's not much of that.

[jbradfor]

In the above sentence, when I read the first four characters I understand the meaning directly: just looking at them I understand them, whether I want to or not.

The thing is, when you first started learning Chinese, you didn't just understand the meaning directly, you had to read it character by character, and puzzle over the meaning. The fact that you can just understand it directly shows how much you learned.

[David Wong]

Does there exist a condition where one thinks one has acquired automatic reading but really hasn't? I think I have that problem, haha.

I don't let unknown words slow me down, until I realize what I'm reading doesn't really make sense. A bad habit of mine is to think that I have acquired shape recognition (for some words I have, but for a vast number I really haven't), so I end up thinking 临 and 监 are the same word, as well as 哀/袁， 载/裁 etc.

Chinese is really pretty damn hard.

[Areckx]

lin and jian 临／监 are different because jian has a bottom radical, blood, and lin is a left/right

[skylee]

animal world, about your comments on short sentences and space, I wonder if you have ever come across novels written by 亦舒. I have stopped reading her books but when I was a fan I noticed that short sentences and paragraphs were her style. It was obvious because it was quite different from other writers'. But this style somehow gives the readers an impression of shallowness (similar to the dialogue in your post). I don't read much modern Chinese novels now but I think there are more writers who write in this way (and I tend to think this implies they can't write longer, deeper things). So I think what you said is not untrue but it is not always the case.

[歐博思]

lin and jian 临／监 are different because jian has a bottom radical, blood

I usually hear this radical described as 皿 mǐn.

I am a skimmer when I read. Dialogue tends to be more abrupt. Personally I prefer longer passages so I can maintain a rhythmn. Regarding reading Chinese, I had a reading class at Qinghua last year where the point of the class was there are too many new words to learn every word you come across. As such one can often guess from context or one of the characters if it is a 2 character combination (similar to figuring out chengyu). I would have stressed out so hard in that class if I had forced myself to learn every new word.

[animal world]

I found the following at an Optical Illusion add-on to my Google home page. Alas, it is an example of automatic reading in English:

Even though the letters are jumbled in the following paragraph, most people have no trouble reading it!

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Skylee, I didn't mean so much short sentence but the presence of white/blank space. I just looked at two articles in the New York Times. The sentences were not short but on average there were only two sentences per paragraph. Then you had the white space between the paragraphs. The eye loves this and is drawn to such reading. In modern, particular popular writing fo the mystery, crime-novel genres, there is a lot of dialogue. On the whole, the dialogue isn't as short as in my silly example but still it generates lots of white space. Soon then, such writing becomes a "page turner." This is exactly what the author and the publisher want because as soon as you're done with this "fun" read you may buy another fun book by this author.

[skylee]

Compressing the texts into fewer pages could mean lower cost thus (possibly) lower price. Many consumers would prefer this to comfort in reading. Taiwanese books usually have wide margins and space and they look nice and are relatively expensive (and heavy, thick, and bulky).

I still think familiarity with the language and also the subject matter is the key to automatic reading. When I read Chinese I don't think I go through the steps described by the OP. I look at the words, recognise the shapes and move on, which is why sometimes I can't detect typos that look like the correct words.

[Silent]

He then says: "You experienced slow thinking [versus the "fast thinking" in the earlier examples] as you proceeded through a sequence of steps …. Carrying out the computation was a strain.

This is not a specific human thing. Also computers have this issue. There it's called caching. It's too much hassle/slow to calculate everything and/or go to the source when something is needed frequently. So the data is stored locally for immediate access. Exactly the same happens with external things. Those objects one needs frequently are stored close at hand. Things that are used infrequenly are stored in a box in the back of the cupboard or even an external storage facility.

This is mainly a function of the frequency of use and has little to do with how simple or complicated it is. You might even put it the other way around. Things are perceived as simple because it ended up in the 'cache'. If you don't use it long enough it will be removed from the 'cache' and it will be perceived as far more difficult again. This can even be true for some fairly basic uses of native language that one has used for dozens of years.

[Guest realmayo]

The thing is, when you first started learning Chinese, you didn't just understand the meaning directly, you had to read it character by character, and puzzle over the meaning. The fact that you can just understand it directly shows how much you learned.

jbradfor: yes exactly, and that's the point that this guy is making: as I quoted above, he mentions the 2+2 calculation or reading or seeing good chess moves as skills which become second nature only after practice.

This is mainly a function of the frequency of use and has little to do with how simple or complicated it is.

Silent: Talk of caches and so on seems like an oversimplification of what is probably a rather complicated set of processes. (And thinking about it just now, the cache idea it doesn't explain why you might in the street suddenly recognise the face of someone you haven't seen or thought about for years.) However what I'm more interested in is our physical reaction when the mind is working on a difficult task, and this book suggests that the physical changes are bigger the more difficult the task is (I mentioned some of those physical changes). And where I'm at in the book so far, he actually mentions that switching between the "easy" and "difficult" tasks can be quite unpleasant and discourage people from continuing a task, which chimes with why I find it hard to motivate myself to keep reading Chinese novels or magazines -- I'm constantly switching from a string of effortless(ish!) understanding to then hitting a word which requires me to strain myself if I want to understand it.

Again, no surprises here: lots of advice on these forums will suggest, as one way of reading, only looking up the first 20 or so new words in a text, and after that trying to read the rest of the text fairly smoothly, without getting bogged down every sentence or two by taking time out to strain oneself by trying to dredge up the meaning of an unfamiliar word or phrase. To me, the ideas in this book have simply shed some light on to why that actually feels easier: nothing groundbreaking for learning Chinese, instead perhaps a bit like knowing why gravity works -- it'd be nice, but the most important thing is what we already knew, that if you let go of something from a height it will fall down.

[icebear]

Again, no surprises here: lots of advice on these forums will suggest, as one way of reading, only looking up the first 20 or so new words in a text, and after that trying to read the rest of the text fairly smoothly, without getting bogged down every sentence or two by taking time out to strain oneself by trying to dredge up the meaning of an unfamiliar word or phrase. To me, the ideas in this book have simply shed some light on to why that actually feels easier: nothing groundbreaking for learning Chinese, instead perhaps a bit like knowing why gravity works -- it'd be nice, but the most important thing is what we already knew, that if you let go of something from a height it will fall down.

My new preference is to use one of the two (online or the downloadable app) tools here [ http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/tools /] to analyze a piece of text, chapter, book, etc before reading it and only study/add the new words which are the most frequent (i.e. most likely to be encountered again); the nice thing about those programs is that can set to filter out any words you've already studied (kept in a second list). In the case of a book I add 200 new words, an article 5-10, and so on. While reading the actual text I'll look up any word I don't know, but I'm not concerned with adding every single one and this keeps me reading more smoothly (and pleasurably). So far that method is working well for me.

[Guest realmayo]

icebear, that's a nifty tool, I'll definitely start using it.

[Silent]

My new preference is to use one of the two (online or the downloadable app) tools here [ http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/tools /] to analyze a piece of text

That's the way I did it for my first book too. See here You can even improve a little on the process by estimating how many characters you'll study when reading the book (take a somewhat low estimate) take the most frequent ones and sort on the order they appear in the book and study them in that order. If you finish study the words and the book is still going you can repeat the process for the remainder of the book. Or even more nifty, analyse the remainder of the book plus the book you intend to read afterwards. For myself, I made a shortlist of books that I want to read and analysed these as a guide of what to learn till I start reading the next book. Doing this however stretches it. With increasing amount of text the tool tends to become very slow in my experience the online tool just tends to crash if you enter a complete book.

During the reading I use a popup dictionary (Perapera) to translate what I don't know. At first I feared I looked up words too easily so I don't really make an effort in understanding the characters I know only half. But near the end of the book I found I used the mousepointer to point at every character. But I looked only at the popup when the meaning wasn't immediately clear to me.

To make the popup dictionary work I convert to html and read it in my webbrowser. I found Calibre a very handy tool for the conversion of all kinds of e-book formats.

[icebear]

With increasing amount of text the tool tends to become very slow in my experience the online tool just tends to crash if you enter a complete book.

Thanks for your tips on sorting by first appearance in the book (after selecting the 200 most frequent I want), that's a good tip. Regarding your issue with the online web tool crashing, you can use the downloadable version which provides a similar functionality in Windows (or a Wine wrapper in OSX) but has less issue with large texts.

[Silent]

Silent: Talk of caches and so on seems like an oversimplification of what is probably a rather complicated set of processes. (And thinking about it just now, the cache idea it doesn't explain why you might in the street suddenly recognise the face of someone you haven't seen or thought about for years.)

Sure, caching is an oversimplification, but then caching can be extremely complicated and nifty too. Recognizing someone after many years isn't the rule, at least not to me. In general it's I know the face, but don't know from what or how. I'm in no way knowledgeable enough to make any significat statements about it. But I feel that recognizing faces is prioritized by our system as it's extremely important for social interaction and hence for survival. Then still it may be that some parts of the cache aren't cleaned up very well. In computing this gives problems every once in a while too.