[tokenadult]

I read English (my native language) and Chinese (my undergraduate major subject). I have been reading articles about reading speed of second-language speakers of Chinese since my first year of study of the language, back in the 1970s. There is a very strong impression among persons who read both languages that reading Chinese is faster, but the experimental finding, over and over over, is that for a given reliable level of comprehension, reading speed does NOT differ in a way that favors Chinese for most bilingual readers, whether their first language is Chinese or their first language is English.

The late John DeFrancis, who through his innovative textbooks was the first teacher of a whole generation of Americans who succeeded in acquiring Chinese as a second language, was a co-founder of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, and author of a fascinating article titled "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese." The Chinese writing system (no matter which form of the spoken language, ancient or modern, it is applied to) is full of ambiguities and other partially cued information that slows down reading--as is every other writing system in the world. By dint of much practice, I can read Chinese comfortably for information on a variety of subjects. By test, I was one of the most proficient readers of Chinese among second-language learners who participated in the norming rounds for a Test of Chinese as a Second Language in the mid-1980s (which I think was never rolled out into regular use, perhaps because it showed that most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese).

Hacker News readers who would like to learn about English, Chinese, or other writing systems would be well advised to read the specialized articles in The World's Writing Systems

http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-Writing-Systems-Peter-Daniels/d...

edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. The article on Chinese is very good, and the overview articles that discuss general features of writing systems are also very good.

[blacksmythe]

  >> most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence than from taking university courses in Chinese

No surprise there. It is hard to learn a foreign language to a high level of fluency without constant background exposure.

[mkr-hn]

I have a friend who took a course in Japanese, went to Japan, then mistook a hospital for a train station. He documented the whole experience, and you could watch as he went from American university fluent to real world fluent. Seeing the difference between school and the real world so clearly helped me get the most out of my two years of community college.

[gwern]

> then mistook a hospital for a train station. He documented the whole experience

Link please.

[mkr-hn]

I lost the link, and I think he made his old journal private when he moved to a different platform.

[dextorious]

Most Europeans learn English (as a foreign language) without a "constant background exposure". And in my country, most people learn German and French (two popular choices for a second/third language) without constant background exposure, too.

So the fact that "most learners learned more Chinese from overseas residence" is a surprise.

[jff]

Simply living in the modern world gives you a constant background exposure to English.

[dextorious]

Not really --you have to tune in to that, too.

I personally met people in California that speak spanish (mexican immigrants), who don't seem to care about learning english all that much, despite living in the US for a decade or so. That is because of the large spanish speaking community there. Even more so in a country where english is not the native language. You can just ignore the "constant background exposure".

It's not like Lady Gaga being in the charts means people also pay attention to what exactly she sings. Even for US movies European countries either use subtitles or have the dialogs spoken in the native language (the second option sucks, btw).

[jerf]

Yes. I "learned" French for four years in high school with no constant background exposure. Of course, I can't actually speak it, or read it, or write it, or understand more than very basic conversation in it (though as it turns out I have actually understood a smidge of French "in the wild"). But I did pass a test in it, once.

On my eternal TODO list is to use a spaced-repetition drilling program to buff up my French vocabulary since I do pretty much have everything else I need to at least read it, but, well, like many around here my TODO list is quite long....

[dextorious]

"""Yes. I "learned" French for four years in high school with no constant background exposure. Of course, I can't actually speak it, or read it, or write it, or understand more than very basic conversation in it (though as it turns out I have actually understood a smidge of French "in the wild"). But I did pass a test in it, once."""

That maybe happens with Americans and high school foreign languages.

In Europe --and certainly in my country--, most people speak the foreign language they were taught just fine, without "constant background exposure". It could be a cultural / motivational thing. I don't think many Americans care to learn foreign languages, despite being forced to do so at high school.

(As an aside: how many foreign language movies do American's watch? We do tons --and not only Hollywood films).

Here where I am, the median family actually PAYS for extra-school language courses. It used to be just english, in the eighties, but since the nineties most children study TWO foreign languages.

[blacksmythe]

  >> Most Europeans learn English (as a foreign language) without a "constant background exposure"

When I biked around France about 20 years ago, I brought along a radio hoping to polish my (very poor) French. All I heard on the radio were songs in English, interspersed occasionally with short bursts of French that were too rapid for me to more than occasionally make out a single word.

[pradocchia]

Aha! "The World's Writing Systems" looks suspiciously like another book I have, "Grammatology" (not the one by Derrida). Published in the 90s and similarly priced, but out of print as far as I know.

Who wrote the chapter on Chinese?

[tokenadult]

Who wrote the chapter on Chinese [in The World's Writing Systems]?

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/?v...

I'm pretty sure it's by William G. Boaltz

http://depts.washington.edu/asianll/people/faculty/boltzwm.h...

whose papers about ancient Chinese are full of surprising details, with insight into how the current writing system developed historically.

[donw]

I'm interested in reading the articles, but $200 to get ahold of them in an out-of-print-book is a bit steep.

Any other sources that you could recommend by chance?

[Jun8]

The book's not out of print, here's the link to OUP: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Linguistics/?v.... You can get it used from Amazon or wait until OUP has their seasonal sales, which happened 3-4 times a year. I bought my copy at one of these sales for around $60.

This is an excellent, authoritative resource on the subject.