January 31, 2024 • 32 mins
Learning a new writing system can be intimidating, especially if it’s completely different from the ones you’re used to. But is it impossible? Of course not! Join Marina and Jeremiah to learn about the history of writing systems, different types and their characteristics, and how to approach the task of (re)learning how to read and write in your target language.
Sources:
Rastle, K. et al. (2021). The Dramatic Impact of Explicit Instruction on Learning to Read in a New Writing System. Link
Wang, M. et al. (2009). The Implicit and Explicit Learning of Orthographic Structure and Function of a New Writing System. Link
New episodes every month! Transcripts available at howtolanguagepod.com. To stay in the loop, follow us on Instagram @howtolang
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jeremiah (00:04):
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to How to Language,
a podcast about languagelearning for learners of
language.
We said we'd be back in January,and we are just barely holding
to that promise.
It is January 31st, last day ofJanuary.
We hope that everybody had agood last few weeks.
We certainly did.
Today we're going to be divinginto writing systems.
(00:25):
There are different writingsystems of different languages,
how they're different, whythey're different, why it
matters for you as a languagelearner, and some ways that you
can more easily learn newwriting systems in the new
languages that you learn.
With all that said, let's divein.
Marina (00:40):
Alright, we're back.
Jeremiah (00:41):
We are so back.
Marina (00:42):
Uh, it's the new year, and we figured that a lot of
people might have made a NewYear's resolution to learn a new
language.
If so, congratulations.
Jeremiah (00:55):
Big time.
Marina (00:56):
And there's a good chance that if you are learning
a new language this year, thatlanguage might have a different
writing system than maybe whatyour first language uses.
So we thought it would be kindof fun to kick off 2024 by
talking about writing systemsand learning new writing
systems.
Jeremiah (01:14):
Big time.
I think when people startlearning another language or
they are thinking about learninganother language, you know, it's
hard to visualize a new writingsystem, and so usually when
other languages are, like,visually represented, it's in
the form of their writingsystems, like, you know that
this is a, ooh, a multilingualthing because it has the word
hello in English and then ithas, like, a Chinese character
(01:37):
and a hieroglyphic, you know.
Marina (01:39):
[Marina laughs] A hieroglyph?
Jeremiah (01:39):
Like, languagey, you know, languagey motifs.
You know, it's really hard torepresent language as anything
else, I guess.
Marina (01:45):
Alright, so, we say the term writing system, and that is
an accurate term to describe howa language is written down, but
the technical term for it, likethe word that we use in
linguistics, is orthography.
Do you know the roots on thatword?
Jeremiah (02:01):
I bet I do.
[Marina laughs] Um, I mean,graph is like writing.
And, Orth, I think is hand.
Marina (02:07):
Really?
Oh, okay.
Jeremiah (02:09):
Is it not?
Marina (02:09):
Are you making that up?
[chuckles]
Jeremiah (02:11):
Well, I'm, I'm, it's an educated guess.
Marina (02:13):
Uh huh.
I'll, I'll look it up.
Jeremiah (02:15):
Cause there's like, well, there's orthopedics,
orthopedic surgeons work on yourhand and your foot.
Are you looking it up?
Marina (02:21):
Yeah.
From the Greek, orthos meaningcorrect.
Jeremiah (02:25):
[incredulously] Ah, what?
Marina (02:27):
And then the second part, yeah, is to write.
Jeremiah (02:29):
Oh, wow.
That's embarrassing.
Marina (02:31):
That's odd.
Jeremiah (02:32):
To write.
Okay, so, orthography meanscorrect writing.
Which is kind of funny becauseit's like already coming at you
with correct or incorrect,trying to make you feel bad.
Marina (02:41):
Interesting.
Weird.
All right.
So orthography kind ofencompasses all of the stuff
that you see when you see alanguage that is written down,
right?
These are things like spelling,the actual graphemes, the, the
units of writing.
In English, for example, thatwould be letters.
Spelling, hyphenation,capitalization, word breaks, so
(03:06):
if the language has spaces ornot, between words, punctuation,
periods, commas, semicolons,etc.
All of those make up anorthography.
Jeremiah (03:17):
Yeah, and the reason writing system is a good a good
synonym is because it really isa system.
Like, a system is not just acollection of things, but a
collection of interrelatedthings that all have distinct
relationships between them, andso in a writing system it's not
just the letters and thepunctuation and the
capitalization and and all therules but all those things
(03:39):
really fit together like puzzlepieces.
And so you know it would besilly to learn English writing
by just learning the letters andnot the punctuation because the
punctuation is a part of thewriting, even, even though the
punctuation marks themselvesdon't stand for like a sound you
make in the language.
It's still part of the system.
(04:00):
Interestingly, punctuation isn'tlike a given for orthographies.
Like, for example, Latin hadkind of some punctuation, but it
wasn't really consistent.
And Latin also didn't havespaces.
Classical Latin.
Marina (04:13):
Yeah, I remember my Latin teacher telling us that
when Latin was being writtendown, like, during, like, Roman
times, you had to just, knowwhen a sentence ended and began.
You had to just, like, based onthe grammar, be able to
understand those sentencebreaks.
Jeremiah (04:30):
Yeah.
Which, you know, might, I don'tknow, might have something to do
with the way that Roman, theRoman saw language, which I
think I've talked about, whichis that.
That for them, language was aspoken thing and writing was
just a way to contain it.
And so they probably figured,well, you know, there's no
spaces when you speak.
If you really look, I mean,obviously they didn't have the
technology to look at, you know,the, the wavelengths or whatever
(04:52):
[both laugh] of, of spokensound, but I mean, there is
truth to that, that spaces arekind of an optical illusion
almost, or an auditory illusion.
But that's neither here northere.
The point is English has spaces.
Lots of languages has spaces.
Marina (05:07):
Japanese doesn't have spaces.
Jeremiah (05:08):
Really?
Oh, see, there you go.
I'm always finding interestingways that Japanese and Latin are
weirdly similar.
It's important to distinct, todistinguish orthography from
phonetics because at least forEnglish learners, we're kind of
brought up to believe that wewrite things the way they sound,
which is true to a certainextent, but surprisingly not as
(05:29):
much as you would think.
The relationship between how,well first of all, the
relationship between how wordsare written, the orthography of
the language, and how they'respoken, the phonetics of the
language, what you actuallyhear, first of all, it's
arbitrary, right?
Letters, or characters, they canlook like things, but at least
(05:49):
for English, the letters justlook like what they look like.
Like, nothing about A is meantto look like the sound A or ah,
if that makes sense.
You know, for other languages,the letters might tell you more
about what they look like, whatthey sound like.
So for example, Korean has analphabet.
It works differently from ours,but each symbol.
(06:09):
does represent a sound andbelieve it or not they're
actually meant to look like theshape that your mouth makes when
you make that sound which iskind of fun.
Marina (06:17):
But that was done very deliberately, like, the person
who invented Hangul did that onpurpose because that made sense,
right?
Jeremiah (06:24):
That's right.
Marina (06:24):
All writing systems had to be invented and some of them
were invented with differentthings in mind.
and so, that's where it getsinto what we would call
transparent or opaqueorthography.
Sometimes it's also referred toas shallow or deep orthography.
They mean basically the samething.
Jeremiah (06:46):
The orthography of a language, for some languages
will look like how it sounds,whether you take that super
literally like Korean, where itliterally looks like the shape
that your mouth is making whenyou say the sounds, or something
like Spanish, which each lettermore or less pretty consistently
(07:06):
corresponds to a single sound ora couple of different sounds
depending on the context.
But for Spanish, if you know thealphabet and you know what each
of those letters signify and therules for writing, then you can
pretty consistently and reliablyfigure out how a word is
pronounced in Spanish if you cansee it written down.
(07:26):
Believe it or not, the same kindof goes for French.
There are a lot more rules, andI wouldn't say that it's nearly
as transparent as Spanish, butthe rules are similarly
consistent to Spanish, eventhough they're also inscrutable,
in my opinion.
No offense.
Marina (07:40):
Like, if you knew the rules for Spanish and French,
then you could encounter anentirely new word, or even a
gibberish word, in thatlanguage, and be able to
pronounce it correctly.
Jeremiah (07:52):
That's right.
And that's an example, those areexamples of transparent.
Or shallow orthographies, whichisn't, shallow sounds like a
mean word.
It's, it's not, it's just theway that it is.
And if you're learning thelanguage, you might really
appreciate that because it makesit easier to pronounce things.
Whereas a language like English,English also has some, you know,
spelling rules for Thiscombination of letters makes
(08:16):
this sound, except in thiscontext, like, I before E,
except after C, and also not inthe words foreigner, or, uh,
like a million other words.
Marina (08:24):
Or most of the words.
Jeremiah (08:25):
Most of the words.
Yeah[both laugh] exactly.
So, for English, you can havesituations where the same
spelling gives you a bunch ofdifferent sounds with no
apparent rhyme or reason.
You can maybe find a rhyme orreason if you look at the
etymology of those words, but Ithink that is giving English a
little too much credit.
(08:45):
We can just look at it and say,hey, English, that's, you're
just very opaque.
You're not transparent at all.
For example, cough.
Laugh.
Slew.
Slough.
Through, thorough.
All these words end, or most ofthem end in pretty, in the same
exact way, with the same, voweland then last few letters.
(09:05):
But, when you say them, they allsound different, because English
is nowhere near as transparentor shallow as Spanish.
Marina (09:13):
If somebody were to encounter that set of words for
the first time written down asan English learner, it And they
were asked to pronounce those,they probably wouldn't be able
to guess how they werepronounced based on the spelling
alone.
That makes it opaque.
Jeremiah (09:28):
Then if you have a language like, I don't know,
would you say that Chinese is apretty opaque language?
Marina (09:33):
Yeah, probably.
I mean, I don't know a ton aboutit, but I get the impression
that There isn't a lot about thecharacters that gives away
phonetic clues.
Maybe sometimes, but I thinkgenerally not.
They might give semantic clues,but that might not give you an
idea of how to actuallypronounce it.
It's the same thing withJapanese kanji, at least.
(09:54):
you look at a character and youreally have no idea how you
would say it.
so that would be an extremelyopaque language, or opaque
writing system.
Jeremiah (10:03):
And again, none of these speak to whether one
language is better than another.
It's, it's really just aquestion of how that language
and its writing system havedeveloped.
You know, that writing systemhad to be invented or inherited
from somewhere else.
And whether it's opaque orshallow is just a question of,
yeah, how, how, how developed.
And it's not awesome for you asa learner if you have a really
(10:25):
opaque writing system to learn,but people do it every day, so
you can do it.
Marina (10:29):
Oh yeah.
It's a challenge, but it'spossible, for sure.
Jeremiah (10:32):
That's right.
think an interesting thing totalk about before going further
as to actually learning a neworthography, is to talk a little
bit about orthographic history,and writing as a historical
development, because what it,what it actually is, is a
technology, believe it or not.
It's a technology that had to beinvented and each individual
(10:55):
writing system also had to beinvented.
They didn't just drop out of thesky.
Like, in other words, language,whether it's signed or spoken,
comes naturally to humans.
Both are equally natural becausehumans with adequate
socialization and childhood, sothey grow up around people
speaking language, whetherspoken or signed, will learn
(11:15):
their first languageautomatically.
But writing doesn't comenaturally.
Writing has to be taught and ithas to be consciously learned.
That's why if you don't teachsomeone to write and read at
some point, they just won't knowhow.
Because it doesn't comenaturally.
It's just like driving a car.
Nobody knows naturally how toride a car.
You have to be taught.
(11:36):
You have to learn.
Also, lots of languages aroundthe world don't have writing
systems.
and a lot of ones that do havewriting systems didn't until
they came into contact with alanguage that did have a writing
system.
So for example, the Cyrillicalphabet that Russian and other
languages use was adapted fromthe Greek alphabet.
(11:56):
Before that, they didn't haveone.
Marina (11:57):
I don't think Korean had a writing system until it
encountered Chinese.
Jeremiah (12:02):
Yeah, Korean used Chinese characters, and then
only in, I think, the 14th or15th century did, uh, the, did
the king, whose name I'mblanking on.
The king, funnily enough! Heinvented the writing system.
Again, can't remember his name,but it's my favorite writing
system by far.
I love Hangul.
Marina (12:20):
I'm glad that we're talking about this because
literacy is a research focus ofmine within language
acquisition.
So literacy is the ability toread and write printed language.
So, actually, like, words on apage.
Having literacy is not anindicator of intelligence for
the reasons that Jeremiah justsaid.
(12:42):
It's not something that humanspossess naturally.
For the most part, the literacyrate in a population of people
is determined by their level ofaccess to education.
and that access to education ishighly dependent on economic and
political factors.
Systematic discrimination,especially against women, if
(13:05):
they're not allowed access toeducation because of their
gender.
It could be the result of thingslike war and natural disasters
that prevent people from goingto school.
If anything is to disrupt thataccess to education, they may
not be able to access literacyeducation, and from there they
(13:26):
may not develop quote unquotefull literacy.
They may know the alphabet andknow a few words, but wouldn't
be able to read a book, forexample.
Jeremiah (13:35):
To take kind of a side tangent, I guess, and bring it
back to video games, like wetalked about last time, in the
time since that episode cameout, I found, or I was shown a
video game called Chants ofSennaar, which is, I don't know,
I have it on Switch, but it's onother things too.
And it's cool because it's,it's, it's not, it's not a
language learning game, like,you know, Duolingo, it's a it's
(13:56):
a puzzle game about learninglanguages And it's really,
really cool and fun if you'reinto that kind of thing, which
if you're listening to us, thenchances are, I think that you
might be It's cool because itmakes a really great survey of
orthography stuff, because eventhough it's a language learning
game, there's not actually anyspoken language in the game.
(14:18):
It's just writing.
Writing is the stand in forlanguage as a whole that you
learn.
And the object is to learn newlanguages through their writing
systems.
And you do that mostly fromcomparison between languages,
through context where you'reseeing words written down, and
with significant, significanttrial and error.
Right?
You can make guesses about whateach letter means, and then test
(14:39):
your hypothesis at the nextpuzzle, and then if you get it
right, then you pass the puzzle,and you know that's what it
means, and if you get it wrong,then you have to go back to the
drawing board.
But, the different orthographiesin the game, showcase some of
the range of writing systems,which is why I'm talking about
it, because writing systems candiffer from each other a lot,
(15:00):
because they're inventions.
And they're also not limited tothe physical properties of the
human mouth.
You can do all kinds of stuffwith a writing system.
So that's why there are so manydifferent looking ones.
The main limitation in the gameis that all the writing systems
are pictographic, meaning eachcharacter represents a word or a
(15:20):
grammatical function instead ofbeing syllabic or alphabetical.
So it's not exactly a one to oneif you're trying to learn
Cyrillic or Hangul or whatever.
But I thought I'd mention itbecause we were just talking
about video games.
And it's very cool.
And I'll talk about it later.
But that does bring us todifferent kinds of
orthographies.
(15:40):
Because we actually haven'ttouched on it yet.
So, we've talked aboutalphabets, which is what we have
in English.
In alphabets, the graphemes, orthe letters, represent
significant sounds and arecombined to form syllables and
words.
So in English, the letter Acorresponds to ah, or aw, or ay,
(16:03):
right, there's that opacityagain.
But not all languages work likethat.
English does, Spanish, German,Latin, Georgian, Armenian,
Korean, like we talked about,but there are several other
types of orthographies.
So what else is there, Marina?
Marina (16:19):
There are also syllabaries, which you could
probably guess what that meansbased off of the name.
This is where graphemesrepresent syllables, which are
sound units consisting of atleast one vowel and often also
one consonant at the beginningor the end.
(16:39):
So examples of syllables wouldbe ah, ma, li, ku, sto.
og[Marina chuckles], barn[bothlaugh].
Jeremiah (16:50):
Barn.
I put barn there because it hasthree consonants.
A B at the beginning, and an R,and an N at the end, and an A in
the middle.
But it's just as much a syllableas the first one, ah.
Marina (17:03):
Now I imagine that most syllabaries use a consonant
vowel syllable structure, whereit's a consonant and then a
vowel, like ma or lee.
I imagine.
Jeremiah (17:13):
That's true.
Marina (17:14):
So, languages that use syllabaries would be Japanese
kana, specifically hiragana andkatakana, Cherokee, Cree, and
Mycenaean Greek.
Turns out there's only a handfulof syllabaries still in use, so,
not very many examples there.
So then we have logographicwriting systems.
(17:35):
You might also hear the wordpictographic.
They're not quite the samething, but for the purposes of
this discussion, they'reessentially the same thing.
So logographic writing systemsuse single characters that
represent an entire word or ideaor grammatical function.
Examples would be Egyptianhieroglyphics, Chinese
(17:58):
characters, Japanese kanji,Mayan hieroglyphics, etc.
Jeremiah (18:04):
One that I really like is abjads.
Abjads are writing systems,they're a lot like alphabets,
but They only consist of theconsonants, and maybe some
optional vowel diacritics.
And the reason that a languagemight use an abjad, is that, for
example, in, well, okay, thereare languages where the vowels
(18:25):
harmonize with each other acrossthe word or even beyond.
And so you kind of already knowwhat the vowel is going to be
based on what the word is doingwithout actually needing to read
it.
And so it's not necessary towrite the vowel.
Of course, you could havelanguages where the vowels just,
they don't get their own lettersjust because.
Like, for example, some modes ofElvish in,[Marina laughs] in
(18:50):
Tolkien's Middle Earth, hisElvish languages, there are
several different modes ofwriting in Elvish, but some of
them are Abjads because, well,yeah, because they don't have
separate vowel, letters,separate vowel graphemes.
They have diacritics, whichmaybe go on top of the
consonants, but the consonantskind of get center stage.
Yeah.
Which is kind of fun.
Marina (19:10):
Diacritics are like additional markings that might
go above or below a grapheme,that indicates some change to
the default pronunciation orsomething like that.
Japanese hiragana havediacritics when you turn, for
example, ha into pa.
(19:30):
You have the little circle aboveit.
That's a diacritic.
The umlaut above letters, that'sa diacritic, the two dots,
accents above letters, like inSpanish, those are diacritics.
Jeremiah (19:41):
Examples of languages that have abjads are, uh,
Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician.
Those are the main ones I knowabout.
Marina (19:49):
Uh, and then the last main type of orthography is an
abugida.
And these ones are a littlefunny, they're somewhere between
an alphabet and a syllabary, butalso a little bit of an abjad.
So basically in an abugida,vowels and consonants, like the
graphemes that represent thoseare treated very differently.
(20:12):
So they both exist, butconsonants definitely take
priority, kind of like an abjad.
Each consonant has, like, abuilt in vowel.
It has, like, a default vowelthat if it stands alone, that's
the vowel that it goes with.
But you can change that vowel,usually with a diacritic.
(20:33):
And unlike an abjad, I don'tthink it's usually optional.
So it's not, like, vowel-less,like some abjads can be, um, but
the vowels and the consonantsare treated differently.
Some examples of abugidas,they're very common in South and
Southeast Asian languages.
So for example, Tibetan,Burmese, Tamil, and Thai all use
(20:57):
abugidas.
Jeremiah (20:59):
Great.
So now that we've had ourselvesa little survey of orthographic
history and just what the heckorthographies are made of, let's
talk about how you actually goabout learning a new writing
system.
So say you're, your firstlanguage is English and maybe
you've studied Spanish or Frenchin high school but you're taking
a stab at Russian or Korean orChinese or Japanese or Tamil,
(21:23):
and the first thing that youencounter is that, Hey, I can't
read this.
[both laugh] I can't even try toread this because the letters
don't look anything like theletters that I'm familiar with.
Or if they maybe kind of look alittle like the letters I'm
familiar with, like in Russianwith Cyrillic, you still don't
know what those letters actuallysound like, because even though
they look like the lettersyou're familiar with, they
usually pretty much always aregoing to sound different.
(21:46):
So you're seeing a new writingsystem and it's a little
daunting, right?
Because, okay, maybe in Spanishyou can just dive right into the
language itself, but if youdon't know the writing system,
you probably have to startthere.
At least with, in most cases,and it is true that it can be
more difficult to learn anotherlanguage if the writing system
(22:08):
is different from the one you'refamiliar with, but you would be
surprised how fast you can learnit.
So I talked about Korean and itswriting system Hangul.
Some people say that theorthography of Korean can be
learned in a day and mastered ina week which, really just I
think speaks to how cool of anorthography it is because it
(22:29):
makes a lot of sense.
Go learn Korean! Go learnHangul.
It's really fun.
But if you're if you're notlearning Hangul, it might take a
little bit longer, but at leastin the case of, uh, some, you
know, an alphabetic or syllab,syllabariotic[Marina laughs]
language, maybe not quite solong.
If you're learning a languagethat is logographic, like
(22:50):
Chinese or Japanese kanji, yeah,you know, I'll level with you.
That could take a while, butthere are ways to deal with
that.
Marina (22:59):
So, reviewing the literature on learning a new
writing system, something reallystands out, amongst all of it
that we really wanted toemphasize here.
Because writing is a technology,we've mentioned that a couple of
times, it is not natural for usto learn.
i.
e.
(23:19):
you won't just pick it up,right?
You could argue that with spokenand signed languages, you could
pick it up through implicitinstruction, you know, meaning
that you just kind of learn asyou go, you don't read a
textbook, you just kind oflisten and, and learn that way.
There could be an argument forthat, but with writing and
(23:42):
reading, you have to sit downand learn about how the writing
system works.
We call this explicitinstruction.
Whether it's reading a textbook,whether it's doing stroke order
exercises, whether it's, youknow, doing spelling tests for
yourself, whether it's likelearning every single letter or
(24:05):
syllable or whatever it is foryour particular writing system.
Writing systems are notintuitive.
They are completely arbitraryand you have to learn the rules.
So what you could do is, thiswould be a good place to start,
is learning about thecharacteristics of the writing
system that you're learning.
(24:25):
So is it a syllabary?
Is it an alphabet?
Is it an abjad?
That'll give you a place tostart, in terms of how to go
about learning the writingsystem and how it works.
Is it transparent?
Is your life gonna be easy?
Is it opaque?
Is it gonna make your life alittle harder?
Jeremiah (24:42):
I like to study a little of the history of the
writing system.
So, you know, the um, I don'tknow if that counts as
etymology, but the history ofwhy the writing system is the
way it is, because that canprovide some surprising insight.
So, like, for example, to takeit back to Hangul and Korean,
once again, if you learn why theletters look the way they look,
and you can start to visualizeit, then I think it makes it
(25:04):
easier to kind of bake in cluesinto the letters as to what they
sound like.
You know, you're giving yourselfextra footholds if you build
context around what you'relearning, and that's true of
anything.
Marina (25:17):
Another thing with learning writing systems is
that, you know, we've talkedabout this before on this show
where we don't recommendlearning spoken and signed
languages like a child wouldbecause we're adults and we just
don't learn like children do.
Our brains don't work likechildren do anymore.
(25:38):
But with learning a new writingsystem, try learning a new
writing system like a childwould learn how to read and
write.
Because a lot of, teachingpraxis was developed with
children learning how to readand write their first languages.
And the differences betweenteaching a child how to read and
write and teaching, an adult howto read and write in a new
(26:01):
language, honestly aren't thatdifferent.
Like, you don't want to treatadults like children, but, like,
the methods and the repetitionand, you know, the types of
practice exercises that you cando.
You can use all of those samethings, you know?
When children are learning kanjiand hanzi, they're doing stroke
(26:23):
order exercises, they're writingthem over and over again, like,
you can do all that stuff too,and it's still going to be
effective, because you're justlearning the same technology.
That is an exception to our, toour thing about learning like
children do.
You can learn a writing like achild would learn.
Jeremiah (26:41):
Yeah, I mean it kind of is an exception and it's kind
of not because the way childrenlearn a writing system is
exactly what we're saying, whichis that it is explicit, whereas
the way they learn languagegenerally is implicit.
Grown ups don't really, don'treally learn language that way,
and we certainly don't learnwriting that way, but what we
(27:02):
have in common with the grownups and the kids is that we all
have to learn writing explicitlybecause it's a technology.
In Chants of Sennaar, to bringit back to that game, you learn
the orthography entirely throughcontext and implicit learning
and it's fun to learn in thatway in that low stakes context
of a puzzle game but it alsotakes hours to learn literally
(27:24):
just a relatively smallcollection of characters.
If you had explicit instructionon those characters you were
told what they mean first of allthe game wouldn't last more than
an hour, and for a game, that'sboring.
But in real life, you don't wantto waste hours and hours in
confusion because you didn'ttake the time to learn the
orthography.
Once you do take the time tolearn the orthography, you can
(27:46):
just go about learning languagelike you normally would because
now you've got that, you've gotthe cypher key in your brain
where you can understand whatall these symbols mean.
Marina (27:56):
So we're talking about explicit instruction and
learning like a child wouldWell, how do you actually do
that?
How do you learn a neworthography?
As with spoken and signedlanguage, input and output.
And in this context that wouldmean reading and writing.
Most language learning softwareincludes both for a good reason.
(28:19):
Getting a lot of input andcreating a lot of output.
That works for learning how toread and write in a new
orthography as well.
and it's important to get bothfor the same reasons that it's
important to get both listeningand speaking practice.
So, it's going to mean a lot ofexposure and it's going to mean
a lot of practice.
Jeremiah (28:39):
For logographic systems like Chinese, these
orthographies have thousands ofunique characters, so breaking
it down into separate radicalsand learning those will make
your job easier.
And maybe you're thinking, wait,what's a radical?
Radicals, in a language likeChinese, or a writing system
like Hanzi, which is the Chinesewriting system, Radicals are the
(28:59):
little pieces that those muchmore complicated characters are
made up of.
And even though there arethousands of characters in
Hanzi, there are not nearly somany radicals.
And the radicals are what makeup those characters.
The radicals themselves don'tnecessarily stand for sounds.
They can do all kinds ofdifferent things.
But knowing them and being ableto recognize them, and knowing
(29:20):
what they mean, because oftenthey mean something or used to,
can help you to recognize andidentify and remember Chinese
characters.
Marina (29:30):
Same thing goes for abjads and abugidas, learning
the diacritics and what theymean, what they do to the base
grapheme or the consonant, ifthat's what the case is, that
can also be applied here.
Jeremiah (29:45):
Another thing about Chinese, really quick, just to
bring it back to that, or, youknow, Japanese kanji, is that
having thousands of charactersthat you need to know in order
to be able to read and write thelanguage in daily life just
makes it so that, unfortunately,you can't learn the orthography
before learning the languageitself like you could with
(30:05):
Korean.
You could learn Hangul, like Isaid, in a week without even
actually knowing any Koreanlanguage itself.
Um, but it would make thenlearning Korean a lot easier.
You can't do that with Chinese.
For Chinese in particular, italso has an alphabetic writing
system that's based on the Latinalphabet called pinyin.
And some advice that I onceheard is to read the whole
(30:26):
textbook or do the whole coursein pinyin first.
Then do it all over again fromstart to finish using the
Chinese characters.
It might seem tedious, but it'sgreat review and it'll help keep
you from getting overloadedtrying to learn Chinese and
Chinese characters at the sametime because that's a lot to ask
of yourself.
Marina (30:46):
And I think that that raises a good point about using
your native writing system thewriting system of your native
language To help you learn thenew writing system that you're
learning There's nothing wrongwith that, especially at first.
Like, it's a good idea to usepinyin, or romaji if you're
learning Japanese.
(31:07):
You already have one writingsystem software OS installed in
your brain.
It's, it's a learning tool.
It's a learning tool to help youlearn other types of writing
system software.
So, don't be afraid to use it tohelp you, especially in the
beginning.
In fact, according topsychology, we do that whether
(31:29):
we want to or not.
Remember when we talked aboutsynesthesia?
Synesthesia mapping onto newwriting systems was primarily
based on your first languageorthography and the colors that
you associated with that.
That kind of tells us that nomatter what you do, you're
always gonna kind of default toyour first language writing
(31:50):
system, and there's nothingwrong with that.
Jeremiah (31:52):
Yeah, because even so, with enough time and practice,
whether you have synesthesia ornot, the new writing system will
begin to feel almost as naturalas your native writing system.
Marina (32:04):
Exactly.
Jeremiah (32:09):
As usual, thank you for listening to this episode of
How to Language on writingsystems.
If you like what we do, you canleave us a review on your
preferred podcast platform.
You can also follow us onInstagram at howtolang or x with
the same handle.
See you next time!
Hello, everybody, and welcome back to How to Language,
a podcast about languagelearning for learners of
language.
We said we'd be back in January,and we are just barely holding
to that promise.
It is January 31st, last day ofJanuary.
We hope that everybody had agood last few weeks.
We certainly did.
Today we're going to be divinginto writing systems.
(00:25):
There are different writingsystems of different languages,
how they're different, whythey're different, why it
matters for you as a languagelearner, and some ways that you
can more easily learn newwriting systems in the new
languages that you learn.
With all that said, let's divein.
Marina (00:40):
Alright, we're back.
Jeremiah (00:41):
We are so back.
Marina (00:42):
Uh, it's the new year, and we figured that a lot of
people might have made a NewYear's resolution to learn a new
language.
If so, congratulations.
Jeremiah (00:55):
Big time.
Marina (00:56):
And there's a good chance that if you are learning
a new language this year, thatlanguage might have a different
writing system than maybe whatyour first language uses.
So we thought it would be kindof fun to kick off 2024 by
talking about writing systemsand learning new writing
systems.
Jeremiah (01:14):
Big time.
I think when people startlearning another language or
they are thinking about learninganother language, you know, it's
hard to visualize a new writingsystem, and so usually when
other languages are, like,visually represented, it's in
the form of their writingsystems, like, you know that
this is a, ooh, a multilingualthing because it has the word
hello in English and then ithas, like, a Chinese character
(01:37):
and a hieroglyphic, you know.
Marina (01:39):
[Marina laughs] A hieroglyph?
Jeremiah (01:39):
Like, languagey, you know, languagey motifs.
You know, it's really hard torepresent language as anything
else, I guess.
Marina (01:45):
Alright, so, we say the term writing system, and that is
an accurate term to describe howa language is written down, but
the technical term for it, likethe word that we use in
linguistics, is orthography.
Do you know the roots on thatword?
Jeremiah (02:01):
I bet I do.
[Marina laughs] Um, I mean,graph is like writing.
And, Orth, I think is hand.
Marina (02:07):
Really?
Oh, okay.
Jeremiah (02:09):
Is it not?
Marina (02:09):
Are you making that up?
[chuckles]
Jeremiah (02:11):
Well, I'm, I'm, it's an educated guess.
Marina (02:13):
Uh huh.
I'll, I'll look it up.
Jeremiah (02:15):
Cause there's like, well, there's orthopedics,
orthopedic surgeons work on yourhand and your foot.
Are you looking it up?
Marina (02:21):
Yeah.
From the Greek, orthos meaningcorrect.
Jeremiah (02:25):
[incredulously] Ah, what?
Marina (02:27):
And then the second part, yeah, is to write.
Jeremiah (02:29):
Oh, wow.
That's embarrassing.
Marina (02:31):
That's odd.
Jeremiah (02:32):
To write.
Okay, so, orthography meanscorrect writing.
Which is kind of funny becauseit's like already coming at you
with correct or incorrect,trying to make you feel bad.
Marina (02:41):
Interesting.
Weird.
All right.
So orthography kind ofencompasses all of the stuff
that you see when you see alanguage that is written down,
right?
These are things like spelling,the actual graphemes, the, the
units of writing.
In English, for example, thatwould be letters.
Spelling, hyphenation,capitalization, word breaks, so
(03:06):
if the language has spaces ornot, between words, punctuation,
periods, commas, semicolons,etc.
All of those make up anorthography.
Jeremiah (03:17):
Yeah, and the reason writing system is a good a good
synonym is because it really isa system.
Like, a system is not just acollection of things, but a
collection of interrelatedthings that all have distinct
relationships between them, andso in a writing system it's not
just the letters and thepunctuation and the
capitalization and and all therules but all those things
(03:39):
really fit together like puzzlepieces.
And so you know it would besilly to learn English writing
by just learning the letters andnot the punctuation because the
punctuation is a part of thewriting, even, even though the
punctuation marks themselvesdon't stand for like a sound you
make in the language.
It's still part of the system.
(04:00):
Interestingly, punctuation isn'tlike a given for orthographies.
Like, for example, Latin hadkind of some punctuation, but it
wasn't really consistent.
And Latin also didn't havespaces.
Classical Latin.
Marina (04:13):
Yeah, I remember my Latin teacher telling us that
when Latin was being writtendown, like, during, like, Roman
times, you had to just, knowwhen a sentence ended and began.
You had to just, like, based onthe grammar, be able to
understand those sentencebreaks.
Jeremiah (04:30):
Yeah.
Which, you know, might, I don'tknow, might have something to do
with the way that Roman, theRoman saw language, which I
think I've talked about, whichis that.
That for them, language was aspoken thing and writing was
just a way to contain it.
And so they probably figured,well, you know, there's no
spaces when you speak.
If you really look, I mean,obviously they didn't have the
technology to look at, you know,the, the wavelengths or whatever
(04:52):
[both laugh] of, of spokensound, but I mean, there is
truth to that, that spaces arekind of an optical illusion
almost, or an auditory illusion.
But that's neither here northere.
The point is English has spaces.
Lots of languages has spaces.
Marina (05:07):
Japanese doesn't have spaces.
Jeremiah (05:08):
Really?
Oh, see, there you go.
I'm always finding interestingways that Japanese and Latin are
weirdly similar.
It's important to distinct, todistinguish orthography from
phonetics because at least forEnglish learners, we're kind of
brought up to believe that wewrite things the way they sound,
which is true to a certainextent, but surprisingly not as
(05:29):
much as you would think.
The relationship between how,well first of all, the
relationship between how wordsare written, the orthography of
the language, and how they'respoken, the phonetics of the
language, what you actuallyhear, first of all, it's
arbitrary, right?
Letters, or characters, they canlook like things, but at least
(05:49):
for English, the letters justlook like what they look like.
Like, nothing about A is meantto look like the sound A or ah,
if that makes sense.
You know, for other languages,the letters might tell you more
about what they look like, whatthey sound like.
So for example, Korean has analphabet.
It works differently from ours,but each symbol.
(06:09):
does represent a sound andbelieve it or not they're
actually meant to look like theshape that your mouth makes when
you make that sound which iskind of fun.
Marina (06:17):
But that was done very deliberately, like, the person
who invented Hangul did that onpurpose because that made sense,
right?
Jeremiah (06:24):
That's right.
Marina (06:24):
All writing systems had to be invented and some of them
were invented with differentthings in mind.
and so, that's where it getsinto what we would call
transparent or opaqueorthography.
Sometimes it's also referred toas shallow or deep orthography.
They mean basically the samething.
Jeremiah (06:46):
The orthography of a language, for some languages
will look like how it sounds,whether you take that super
literally like Korean, where itliterally looks like the shape
that your mouth is making whenyou say the sounds, or something
like Spanish, which each lettermore or less pretty consistently
(07:06):
corresponds to a single sound ora couple of different sounds
depending on the context.
But for Spanish, if you know thealphabet and you know what each
of those letters signify and therules for writing, then you can
pretty consistently and reliablyfigure out how a word is
pronounced in Spanish if you cansee it written down.
(07:26):
Believe it or not, the same kindof goes for French.
There are a lot more rules, andI wouldn't say that it's nearly
as transparent as Spanish, butthe rules are similarly
consistent to Spanish, eventhough they're also inscrutable,
in my opinion.
No offense.
Marina (07:40):
Like, if you knew the rules for Spanish and French,
then you could encounter anentirely new word, or even a
gibberish word, in thatlanguage, and be able to
pronounce it correctly.
Jeremiah (07:52):
That's right.
And that's an example, those areexamples of transparent.
Or shallow orthographies, whichisn't, shallow sounds like a
mean word.
It's, it's not, it's just theway that it is.
And if you're learning thelanguage, you might really
appreciate that because it makesit easier to pronounce things.
Whereas a language like English,English also has some, you know,
spelling rules for Thiscombination of letters makes
(08:16):
this sound, except in thiscontext, like, I before E,
except after C, and also not inthe words foreigner, or, uh,
like a million other words.
Marina (08:24):
Or most of the words.
Jeremiah (08:25):
Most of the words.
Yeah[both laugh] exactly.
So, for English, you can havesituations where the same
spelling gives you a bunch ofdifferent sounds with no
apparent rhyme or reason.
You can maybe find a rhyme orreason if you look at the
etymology of those words, but Ithink that is giving English a
little too much credit.
(08:45):
We can just look at it and say,hey, English, that's, you're
just very opaque.
You're not transparent at all.
For example, cough.
Laugh.
Slew.
Slough.
Through, thorough.
All these words end, or most ofthem end in pretty, in the same
exact way, with the same, voweland then last few letters.
(09:05):
But, when you say them, they allsound different, because English
is nowhere near as transparentor shallow as Spanish.
Marina (09:13):
If somebody were to encounter that set of words for
the first time written down asan English learner, it And they
were asked to pronounce those,they probably wouldn't be able
to guess how they werepronounced based on the spelling
alone.
That makes it opaque.
Jeremiah (09:28):
Then if you have a language like, I don't know,
would you say that Chinese is apretty opaque language?
Marina (09:33):
Yeah, probably.
I mean, I don't know a ton aboutit, but I get the impression
that There isn't a lot about thecharacters that gives away
phonetic clues.
Maybe sometimes, but I thinkgenerally not.
They might give semantic clues,but that might not give you an
idea of how to actuallypronounce it.
It's the same thing withJapanese kanji, at least.
(09:54):
you look at a character and youreally have no idea how you
would say it.
so that would be an extremelyopaque language, or opaque
writing system.
Jeremiah (10:03):
And again, none of these speak to whether one
language is better than another.
It's, it's really just aquestion of how that language
and its writing system havedeveloped.
You know, that writing systemhad to be invented or inherited
from somewhere else.
And whether it's opaque orshallow is just a question of,
yeah, how, how, how developed.
And it's not awesome for you asa learner if you have a really
(10:25):
opaque writing system to learn,but people do it every day, so
you can do it.
Marina (10:29):
Oh yeah.
It's a challenge, but it'spossible, for sure.
Jeremiah (10:32):
That's right.
think an interesting thing totalk about before going further
as to actually learning a neworthography, is to talk a little
bit about orthographic history,and writing as a historical
development, because what it,what it actually is, is a
technology, believe it or not.
It's a technology that had to beinvented and each individual
(10:55):
writing system also had to beinvented.
They didn't just drop out of thesky.
Like, in other words, language,whether it's signed or spoken,
comes naturally to humans.
Both are equally natural becausehumans with adequate
socialization and childhood, sothey grow up around people
speaking language, whetherspoken or signed, will learn
(11:15):
their first languageautomatically.
But writing doesn't comenaturally.
Writing has to be taught and ithas to be consciously learned.
That's why if you don't teachsomeone to write and read at
some point, they just won't knowhow.
Because it doesn't comenaturally.
It's just like driving a car.
Nobody knows naturally how toride a car.
You have to be taught.
(11:36):
You have to learn.
Also, lots of languages aroundthe world don't have writing
systems.
and a lot of ones that do havewriting systems didn't until
they came into contact with alanguage that did have a writing
system.
So for example, the Cyrillicalphabet that Russian and other
languages use was adapted fromthe Greek alphabet.
(11:56):
Before that, they didn't haveone.
Marina (11:57):
I don't think Korean had a writing system until it
encountered Chinese.
Jeremiah (12:02):
Yeah, Korean used Chinese characters, and then
only in, I think, the 14th or15th century did, uh, the, did
the king, whose name I'mblanking on.
The king, funnily enough! Heinvented the writing system.
Again, can't remember his name,but it's my favorite writing
system by far.
I love Hangul.
Marina (12:20):
I'm glad that we're talking about this because
literacy is a research focus ofmine within language
acquisition.
So literacy is the ability toread and write printed language.
So, actually, like, words on apage.
Having literacy is not anindicator of intelligence for
the reasons that Jeremiah justsaid.
(12:42):
It's not something that humanspossess naturally.
For the most part, the literacyrate in a population of people
is determined by their level ofaccess to education.
and that access to education ishighly dependent on economic and
political factors.
Systematic discrimination,especially against women, if
(13:05):
they're not allowed access toeducation because of their
gender.
It could be the result of thingslike war and natural disasters
that prevent people from goingto school.
If anything is to disrupt thataccess to education, they may
not be able to access literacyeducation, and from there they
(13:26):
may not develop quote unquotefull literacy.
They may know the alphabet andknow a few words, but wouldn't
be able to read a book, forexample.
Jeremiah (13:35):
To take kind of a side tangent, I guess, and bring it
back to video games, like wetalked about last time, in the
time since that episode cameout, I found, or I was shown a
video game called Chants ofSennaar, which is, I don't know,
I have it on Switch, but it's onother things too.
And it's cool because it's,it's, it's not, it's not a
language learning game, like,you know, Duolingo, it's a it's
(13:56):
a puzzle game about learninglanguages And it's really,
really cool and fun if you'reinto that kind of thing, which
if you're listening to us, thenchances are, I think that you
might be It's cool because itmakes a really great survey of
orthography stuff, because eventhough it's a language learning
game, there's not actually anyspoken language in the game.
(14:18):
It's just writing.
Writing is the stand in forlanguage as a whole that you
learn.
And the object is to learn newlanguages through their writing
systems.
And you do that mostly fromcomparison between languages,
through context where you'reseeing words written down, and
with significant, significanttrial and error.
Right?
You can make guesses about whateach letter means, and then test
(14:39):
your hypothesis at the nextpuzzle, and then if you get it
right, then you pass the puzzle,and you know that's what it
means, and if you get it wrong,then you have to go back to the
drawing board.
But, the different orthographiesin the game, showcase some of
the range of writing systems,which is why I'm talking about
it, because writing systems candiffer from each other a lot,
(15:00):
because they're inventions.
And they're also not limited tothe physical properties of the
human mouth.
You can do all kinds of stuffwith a writing system.
So that's why there are so manydifferent looking ones.
The main limitation in the gameis that all the writing systems
are pictographic, meaning eachcharacter represents a word or a
(15:20):
grammatical function instead ofbeing syllabic or alphabetical.
So it's not exactly a one to oneif you're trying to learn
Cyrillic or Hangul or whatever.
But I thought I'd mention itbecause we were just talking
about video games.
And it's very cool.
And I'll talk about it later.
But that does bring us todifferent kinds of
orthographies.
(15:40):
Because we actually haven'ttouched on it yet.
So, we've talked aboutalphabets, which is what we have
in English.
In alphabets, the graphemes, orthe letters, represent
significant sounds and arecombined to form syllables and
words.
So in English, the letter Acorresponds to ah, or aw, or ay,
(16:03):
right, there's that opacityagain.
But not all languages work likethat.
English does, Spanish, German,Latin, Georgian, Armenian,
Korean, like we talked about,but there are several other
types of orthographies.
So what else is there, Marina?
Marina (16:19):
There are also syllabaries, which you could
probably guess what that meansbased off of the name.
This is where graphemesrepresent syllables, which are
sound units consisting of atleast one vowel and often also
one consonant at the beginningor the end.
(16:39):
So examples of syllables wouldbe ah, ma, li, ku, sto.
og[Marina chuckles], barn[bothlaugh].
Jeremiah (16:50):
Barn.
I put barn there because it hasthree consonants.
A B at the beginning, and an R,and an N at the end, and an A in
the middle.
But it's just as much a syllableas the first one, ah.
Marina (17:03):
Now I imagine that most syllabaries use a consonant
vowel syllable structure, whereit's a consonant and then a
vowel, like ma or lee.
I imagine.
Jeremiah (17:13):
That's true.
Marina (17:14):
So, languages that use syllabaries would be Japanese
kana, specifically hiragana andkatakana, Cherokee, Cree, and
Mycenaean Greek.
Turns out there's only a handfulof syllabaries still in use, so,
not very many examples there.
So then we have logographicwriting systems.
(17:35):
You might also hear the wordpictographic.
They're not quite the samething, but for the purposes of
this discussion, they'reessentially the same thing.
So logographic writing systemsuse single characters that
represent an entire word or ideaor grammatical function.
Examples would be Egyptianhieroglyphics, Chinese
(17:58):
characters, Japanese kanji,Mayan hieroglyphics, etc.
Jeremiah (18:04):
One that I really like is abjads.
Abjads are writing systems,they're a lot like alphabets,
but They only consist of theconsonants, and maybe some
optional vowel diacritics.
And the reason that a languagemight use an abjad, is that, for
example, in, well, okay, thereare languages where the vowels
(18:25):
harmonize with each other acrossthe word or even beyond.
And so you kind of already knowwhat the vowel is going to be
based on what the word is doingwithout actually needing to read
it.
And so it's not necessary towrite the vowel.
Of course, you could havelanguages where the vowels just,
they don't get their own lettersjust because.
Like, for example, some modes ofElvish in,[Marina laughs] in
(18:50):
Tolkien's Middle Earth, hisElvish languages, there are
several different modes ofwriting in Elvish, but some of
them are Abjads because, well,yeah, because they don't have
separate vowel, letters,separate vowel graphemes.
They have diacritics, whichmaybe go on top of the
consonants, but the consonantskind of get center stage.
Yeah.
Which is kind of fun.
Marina (19:10):
Diacritics are like additional markings that might
go above or below a grapheme,that indicates some change to
the default pronunciation orsomething like that.
Japanese hiragana havediacritics when you turn, for
example, ha into pa.
(19:30):
You have the little circle aboveit.
That's a diacritic.
The umlaut above letters, that'sa diacritic, the two dots,
accents above letters, like inSpanish, those are diacritics.
Jeremiah (19:41):
Examples of languages that have abjads are, uh,
Arabic, Hebrew, Phoenician.
Those are the main ones I knowabout.
Marina (19:49):
Uh, and then the last main type of orthography is an
abugida.
And these ones are a littlefunny, they're somewhere between
an alphabet and a syllabary, butalso a little bit of an abjad.
So basically in an abugida,vowels and consonants, like the
graphemes that represent thoseare treated very differently.
(20:12):
So they both exist, butconsonants definitely take
priority, kind of like an abjad.
Each consonant has, like, abuilt in vowel.
It has, like, a default vowelthat if it stands alone, that's
the vowel that it goes with.
But you can change that vowel,usually with a diacritic.
(20:33):
And unlike an abjad, I don'tthink it's usually optional.
So it's not, like, vowel-less,like some abjads can be, um, but
the vowels and the consonantsare treated differently.
Some examples of abugidas,they're very common in South and
Southeast Asian languages.
So for example, Tibetan,Burmese, Tamil, and Thai all use
(20:57):
abugidas.
Jeremiah (20:59):
Great.
So now that we've had ourselvesa little survey of orthographic
history and just what the heckorthographies are made of, let's
talk about how you actually goabout learning a new writing
system.
So say you're, your firstlanguage is English and maybe
you've studied Spanish or Frenchin high school but you're taking
a stab at Russian or Korean orChinese or Japanese or Tamil,
(21:23):
and the first thing that youencounter is that, Hey, I can't
read this.
[both laugh] I can't even try toread this because the letters
don't look anything like theletters that I'm familiar with.
Or if they maybe kind of look alittle like the letters I'm
familiar with, like in Russianwith Cyrillic, you still don't
know what those letters actuallysound like, because even though
they look like the lettersyou're familiar with, they
usually pretty much always aregoing to sound different.
(21:46):
So you're seeing a new writingsystem and it's a little
daunting, right?
Because, okay, maybe in Spanishyou can just dive right into the
language itself, but if youdon't know the writing system,
you probably have to startthere.
At least with, in most cases,and it is true that it can be
more difficult to learn anotherlanguage if the writing system
(22:08):
is different from the one you'refamiliar with, but you would be
surprised how fast you can learnit.
So I talked about Korean and itswriting system Hangul.
Some people say that theorthography of Korean can be
learned in a day and mastered ina week which, really just I
think speaks to how cool of anorthography it is because it
(22:29):
makes a lot of sense.
Go learn Korean! Go learnHangul.
It's really fun.
But if you're if you're notlearning Hangul, it might take a
little bit longer, but at leastin the case of, uh, some, you
know, an alphabetic or syllab,syllabariotic[Marina laughs]
language, maybe not quite solong.
If you're learning a languagethat is logographic, like
(22:50):
Chinese or Japanese kanji, yeah,you know, I'll level with you.
That could take a while, butthere are ways to deal with
that.
Marina (22:59):
So, reviewing the literature on learning a new
writing system, something reallystands out, amongst all of it
that we really wanted toemphasize here.
Because writing is a technology,we've mentioned that a couple of
times, it is not natural for usto learn.
i.
e.
(23:19):
you won't just pick it up,right?
You could argue that with spokenand signed languages, you could
pick it up through implicitinstruction, you know, meaning
that you just kind of learn asyou go, you don't read a
textbook, you just kind oflisten and, and learn that way.
There could be an argument forthat, but with writing and
(23:42):
reading, you have to sit downand learn about how the writing
system works.
We call this explicitinstruction.
Whether it's reading a textbook,whether it's doing stroke order
exercises, whether it's, youknow, doing spelling tests for
yourself, whether it's likelearning every single letter or
(24:05):
syllable or whatever it is foryour particular writing system.
Writing systems are notintuitive.
They are completely arbitraryand you have to learn the rules.
So what you could do is, thiswould be a good place to start,
is learning about thecharacteristics of the writing
system that you're learning.
(24:25):
So is it a syllabary?
Is it an alphabet?
Is it an abjad?
That'll give you a place tostart, in terms of how to go
about learning the writingsystem and how it works.
Is it transparent?
Is your life gonna be easy?
Is it opaque?
Is it gonna make your life alittle harder?
Jeremiah (24:42):
I like to study a little of the history of the
writing system.
So, you know, the um, I don'tknow if that counts as
etymology, but the history ofwhy the writing system is the
way it is, because that canprovide some surprising insight.
So, like, for example, to takeit back to Hangul and Korean,
once again, if you learn why theletters look the way they look,
and you can start to visualizeit, then I think it makes it
(25:04):
easier to kind of bake in cluesinto the letters as to what they
sound like.
You know, you're giving yourselfextra footholds if you build
context around what you'relearning, and that's true of
anything.
Marina (25:17):
Another thing with learning writing systems is
that, you know, we've talkedabout this before on this show
where we don't recommendlearning spoken and signed
languages like a child wouldbecause we're adults and we just
don't learn like children do.
Our brains don't work likechildren do anymore.
(25:38):
But with learning a new writingsystem, try learning a new
writing system like a childwould learn how to read and
write.
Because a lot of, teachingpraxis was developed with
children learning how to readand write their first languages.
And the differences betweenteaching a child how to read and
write and teaching, an adult howto read and write in a new
(26:01):
language, honestly aren't thatdifferent.
Like, you don't want to treatadults like children, but, like,
the methods and the repetitionand, you know, the types of
practice exercises that you cando.
You can use all of those samethings, you know?
When children are learning kanjiand hanzi, they're doing stroke
(26:23):
order exercises, they're writingthem over and over again, like,
you can do all that stuff too,and it's still going to be
effective, because you're justlearning the same technology.
That is an exception to our, toour thing about learning like
children do.
You can learn a writing like achild would learn.
Jeremiah (26:41):
Yeah, I mean it kind of is an exception and it's kind
of not because the way childrenlearn a writing system is
exactly what we're saying, whichis that it is explicit, whereas
the way they learn languagegenerally is implicit.
Grown ups don't really, don'treally learn language that way,
and we certainly don't learnwriting that way, but what we
(27:02):
have in common with the grownups and the kids is that we all
have to learn writing explicitlybecause it's a technology.
In Chants of Sennaar, to bringit back to that game, you learn
the orthography entirely throughcontext and implicit learning
and it's fun to learn in thatway in that low stakes context
of a puzzle game but it alsotakes hours to learn literally
(27:24):
just a relatively smallcollection of characters.
If you had explicit instructionon those characters you were
told what they mean first of allthe game wouldn't last more than
an hour, and for a game, that'sboring.
But in real life, you don't wantto waste hours and hours in
confusion because you didn'ttake the time to learn the
orthography.
Once you do take the time tolearn the orthography, you can
(27:46):
just go about learning languagelike you normally would because
now you've got that, you've gotthe cypher key in your brain
where you can understand whatall these symbols mean.
Marina (27:56):
So we're talking about explicit instruction and
learning like a child wouldWell, how do you actually do
that?
How do you learn a neworthography?
As with spoken and signedlanguage, input and output.
And in this context that wouldmean reading and writing.
Most language learning softwareincludes both for a good reason.
(28:19):
Getting a lot of input andcreating a lot of output.
That works for learning how toread and write in a new
orthography as well.
and it's important to get bothfor the same reasons that it's
important to get both listeningand speaking practice.
So, it's going to mean a lot ofexposure and it's going to mean
a lot of practice.
Jeremiah (28:39):
For logographic systems like Chinese, these
orthographies have thousands ofunique characters, so breaking
it down into separate radicalsand learning those will make
your job easier.
And maybe you're thinking, wait,what's a radical?
Radicals, in a language likeChinese, or a writing system
like Hanzi, which is the Chinesewriting system, Radicals are the
(28:59):
little pieces that those muchmore complicated characters are
made up of.
And even though there arethousands of characters in
Hanzi, there are not nearly somany radicals.
And the radicals are what makeup those characters.
The radicals themselves don'tnecessarily stand for sounds.
They can do all kinds ofdifferent things.
But knowing them and being ableto recognize them, and knowing
(29:20):
what they mean, because oftenthey mean something or used to,
can help you to recognize andidentify and remember Chinese
characters.
Marina (29:30):
Same thing goes for abjads and abugidas, learning
the diacritics and what theymean, what they do to the base
grapheme or the consonant, ifthat's what the case is, that
can also be applied here.
Jeremiah (29:45):
Another thing about Chinese, really quick, just to
bring it back to that, or, youknow, Japanese kanji, is that
having thousands of charactersthat you need to know in order
to be able to read and write thelanguage in daily life just
makes it so that, unfortunately,you can't learn the orthography
before learning the languageitself like you could with
(30:05):
Korean.
You could learn Hangul, like Isaid, in a week without even
actually knowing any Koreanlanguage itself.
Um, but it would make thenlearning Korean a lot easier.
You can't do that with Chinese.
For Chinese in particular, italso has an alphabetic writing
system that's based on the Latinalphabet called pinyin.
And some advice that I onceheard is to read the whole
(30:26):
textbook or do the whole coursein pinyin first.
Then do it all over again fromstart to finish using the
Chinese characters.
It might seem tedious, but it'sgreat review and it'll help keep
you from getting overloadedtrying to learn Chinese and
Chinese characters at the sametime because that's a lot to ask
of yourself.
Marina (30:46):
And I think that that raises a good point about using
your native writing system thewriting system of your native
language To help you learn thenew writing system that you're
learning There's nothing wrongwith that, especially at first.
Like, it's a good idea to usepinyin, or romaji if you're
learning Japanese.
(31:07):
You already have one writingsystem software OS installed in
your brain.
It's, it's a learning tool.
It's a learning tool to help youlearn other types of writing
system software.
So, don't be afraid to use it tohelp you, especially in the
beginning.
In fact, according topsychology, we do that whether
(31:29):
we want to or not.
Remember when we talked aboutsynesthesia?
Synesthesia mapping onto newwriting systems was primarily
based on your first languageorthography and the colors that
you associated with that.
That kind of tells us that nomatter what you do, you're
always gonna kind of default toyour first language writing
(31:50):
system, and there's nothingwrong with that.
Jeremiah (31:52):
Yeah, because even so, with enough time and practice,
whether you have synesthesia ornot, the new writing system will
begin to feel almost as naturalas your native writing system.
Marina (32:04):
Exactly.
Jeremiah (32:09):
As usual, thank you for listening to this episode of
How to Language on writingsystems.
If you like what we do, you canleave us a review on your
preferred podcast platform.
You can also follow us onInstagram at howtolang or x with
the same handle.
See you next time!
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!