<story><title>The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters</title><url>http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31781</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcguire</author><text>Brian Spooner&amp;#x27;s comment on the article is interesting, too:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...In Iran I was always fascinated and puzzled by seeing Persians read Persian much faster than I could read English. [...] Our answer was that literate Persians (and Urdu-writers) think, see and act much less in terms of individual letters (than we do, and than we are taught to do as we learn to read and write). They see and write pen-strokes, each of which may contain 1, 2, three or even four letters, possibly (though rarely) more. The letters are written differently according to where they come in the pen-stroke and the pen-strokes are written differently according to what comes before or after them. Readers read pen-strokes (the number of which is very large), not letters. They read faster because they are scanning by series of pen-stokes. We also tend to read English by scanning words rather than reading letters, but the Persian reader is much more efficient and faster at then. The general approach and relationship to writing is different from ours. Its practice is different. And its result is different. There is much more to be said about this. But enough for this comment.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know anything about Persian, but I now feel the need to go learn more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>srssays</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s because it cheats!&lt;p&gt;Arabic script has three layers:&lt;p&gt;1. The base forms (rasm) denote groups of consonants.&lt;p&gt;2. Then dots distinguish individual consonants (e.g. B, T, TH, Y and N have the same basic form but have different arrangements of dots).&lt;p&gt;3. Finally, diacritics - loops and dashes - are used to denote vowels.&lt;p&gt;When Arabic is fully laden with vowel markings, the result is visually noisy. So usually vowel markings are left out.&lt;p&gt;But without vowels, it is impossible to tell how a word is pronounced if you don&amp;#x27;t already know. It&amp;#x27;s a really heavy price to pay for any advantage in reading speed.</text></comment>
<story><title>The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters</title><url>http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31781</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mcguire</author><text>Brian Spooner&amp;#x27;s comment on the article is interesting, too:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...In Iran I was always fascinated and puzzled by seeing Persians read Persian much faster than I could read English. [...] Our answer was that literate Persians (and Urdu-writers) think, see and act much less in terms of individual letters (than we do, and than we are taught to do as we learn to read and write). They see and write pen-strokes, each of which may contain 1, 2, three or even four letters, possibly (though rarely) more. The letters are written differently according to where they come in the pen-stroke and the pen-strokes are written differently according to what comes before or after them. Readers read pen-strokes (the number of which is very large), not letters. They read faster because they are scanning by series of pen-stokes. We also tend to read English by scanning words rather than reading letters, but the Persian reader is much more efficient and faster at then. The general approach and relationship to writing is different from ours. Its practice is different. And its result is different. There is much more to be said about this. But enough for this comment.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know anything about Persian, but I now feel the need to go learn more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxander</author><text>It would be interesting to see if the same system could be implemented for English.  Say, make a text renderer that groups common sequences of 2-to-4 letters into one distinct (but still immediately legible) glyph; the set of available glyphs would remain constant.  With practice, readers&amp;#x27; brains might learn the glyphs as a &amp;quot;shortcut&amp;quot; to take in these sets of letters- almost like a very basic compression scheme programmed into your reading-comprehension neurons.</text></comment>