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Sinobear · Joined: 24 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269 Location: Purgatory

Shan-Shan, I doubt very much that rear-view mirrors ever enter a person's mind in China when they think of cars Laughing

Cheers!

Shan-Shan · Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 1074 Location: electric pastures

Shan-Shan · Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 1074 Location: electric pastures

Steppenwolf · Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 1769

I guess we can only speculate on whether the Chinese represent language in their minds visually, that is, through the written characters that stand for syllables. Considering the endless supply of homophones it would seem rather likely.

In the case of Chinese characters for 'horse' and 'mother', the characters are pictographic symbols that give a phonetic background of the word without informing the reader of its tone.

The question is: were you to study 56'000 characters to fully master your mother tongue, wouldn't you resort to thinking of a way to simplify your job of understanding SPOKEN CHinese by visualising the characters as they are uttered orally?

Look at any Chinese TV programme and you will see that there nearly always is a Chinese transcript even when the dialogues are in Mandarin and the targeted audience is native Mandarin speakers. In Hong Kong its always dubbed into the local traditional characters. Why is that? It isn't only for dialect speakers!

I also note that CHinese make an inordinate use of sign language and their speeches tend to be laconic and elliptical (noticeable when they translate into English: subjects often get dropped).

To learn Chinese you have to activate your memory much more than if you learn a Western language. Studying an Indo-European language requires more analytical thought (think of Latin!) and merely visualising the written words won't always help in understanding the meaning.

The CHinese do believe memory is the key to understanding a language, a belief few Westerners share to that extent. Once I became a little more aware of it when I was visiting a kindergarten class in progress.
The kids were not allowed to learn how to write and read, yet they were made "to read a book" without having learnt the various characters contained in it.
They were guided by specialists in listening to a taperecorder that pronounced every single syllable slowly while the kids' eyes were trained simultaneously on that character visible on a white board illuminated by an overhead projector. The kids had to move their eyes back and forth and it was assumed they would "learn" those characters this way. I don't know how successful they were at this!

Shan-Shan · Joined: 28 Aug 2003 Posts: 1074 Location: electric pastures

furiousmilksheikali · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 8:48 am Post subject:

Yes, and the very fact that Chinese speakers will have learnt the majority of their spoken language long before they have even basic reading skills suggests that they do not need to visualize the characters in order to use them.

vikdk · Joined: 25 Jun 2003 Posts: 1676

tofit · Joined: 22 Oct 2006 Posts: 47

Visual representation was what I was tring to lead the topic into. Many of you seem more interested in exploring/exposing my ignorance.

I have not studied chinese in depth. I did have a chinese tutor who lightly trained me in a few sessions. What makes me think that the chinese visualise the characters when they speak or hear a word?

I asked a couple chinese people if they visualize the characters when they speak, or hear a word. Maybe they were just agreeing with me...
OR.....

foreignDevil · Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 580

[quote="Steppenwolf"]I guess we can only speculate on whether the Chinese represent language in their minds visually, that is, through the written characters that stand for syllables. quote]

I am a little surprised at this statement, Roger, considering your Saussure quote at the end of your messages. Have you read Course in General Linguistics, by the way?

foreigndevil.

vikdk · Joined: 25 Jun 2003 Posts: 1676

danielb · Joined: 08 Aug 2003 Posts: 490

Tofit: "Xiao Wang, when speaking (listening to) Putonghua do you visualise each character in your mind's eye so as to understand the meaning of the utterance?"

小王: "Yes, can you use chopsticks?"

Tofit: "What about you Liu Jing?"

刘京: "Yes, America is a beautiful country!"

Aha! Proof!

Sorry Tofit, but have you heard how fast they speak? I asked my girlfriend about this and she said she has never heard of anything so strange in her entire life.

Steppenwolf · Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 1769

The question whether the Chinese think up the chaaracters that symbolise the words they are uttering or hearing has not been resolved and it can't be resolved because the Chinese are literate to very varying degrees - nin the case of alphabet-based languages, speakers of them are either literate or illiterate, perhaps semiliterate, but in the case of Chinese you invariably are dealing with native speakers that will never possess the entirety of their vocabulary in their memory.
But I will make this contention: even westerners - and the OP has stated as much, I will second him by adding that myself occasionally represents in my mind words in a foreign tongue - Chinese, for example, Latin sometimes - in their written form. This is a trick the literate mind - perhaps involuntarily - performs to sort out homophones: just think of French
- saint (a saint) sein (female breast) and words with similar assonance: cinque, ceinture: cinque saints or cinque seins.

If the sentence is uttered in the L 2, mental representation clearly is a useful crutch.

Exposing our students to more written communication would probably smooth most wrinkles in their syntax and grammar because they would actually see with their own eyes the language they are supposed to produce on their own (but fail to produce because, as I showed in my previous example of a student reciting a whole 200-word text, students actually multitask - they speak in the target language while they think in their first tongue. They get so inured to translating back and forth they can almost never use the target language well.,

daodejing · Joined: 08 Sep 2006 Posts: 39

Interesting topic. I 'm fascinated by how a people'e thinking is affected by the structure of its language. My East Asian religion teacher in College, who was a very respected academic, claimed that uninflected languages with characters, such as Chinese, leads to very concrete (not abstract) thought. But then again it seems all the dialects, with no written form, were allowed to morph into whatever people needed to communicate, so the fact that Chinese is written with characters should not have had too much effect on the speaking patterns of the Chinese, the majority of whom had absolutely no contact with or use for the written language.

I've found the Chinese to be just as, if not more, unconscious about what they say and how that would "look" written down. Ask a Chinese person if they think it's funny that mamahuhu means "horse horse tiger tiger", and you'll find many hadn't even realized it. And most Chinese are speaking in dialect which has no written form...and they may barely make the connection between the word in their dialect, the similar sounding word in putonghua of the same meaning, and the characters associated with that word.

Slightly off topic: Another study I read about went like this: Participants in the study are shown 3 pictures. Picture 1 depicts a person kicking a ball. Picture 2 depicts the same person from the first picture having kicked a ball (it showed the ball in the distance and the person's leg following through), and picture 3 depicts a different person fromt the first 2 pictures having kicked a ball. When people are asked which 2 pictures have the most in common, they find that people whose language puts a lot of emphasis on tense said that the 2nd two pictures had the most in common because they both showed someone having kicked a ball. People from a culture whose language has no tense thought that the first 2 pictures had the most in common because it was the same person--the fact that one picture showed kicking and the second one showed kicking already taken place didn't matter to them.

People always say the Chinese don't plan ahead very well, or at least they don't tell the FT what will happen for whatever reason...maybe they think it's not important. Could part of the explanation be that their language has no tense? They know how to express that something will happen, or that they plan to do something, but I don't know if that's the same thing as having tense.

They say that the sea gypsies in Thailand & Myanmar have absolutely no words associated with time--they simply live in the present. If they get hungry they'll spear a fish and eat it. If they want to visit relatives on another island they just show up unannounced...and they're there. I think the structure of one's language does affect how he thinks, but sometimes the argument is overdone by those wishing to show that there are great differences between cultures or that one's culture is superior to another's).