Are you Dyslexic... in Chinese?

Hi bbjt,

That’s very strange. At least they must know the word 风筝 (feng1 zheng, a kite), even if they don’t know 古筝. Actually Chinese people often forget, or don’t know, how to write some characters that are mainly used in very colloquial words, such as 罗嗦, 嘟囔, 折腾, and 唠嗑, but I can’t believe those students don’t know “筝”, such a simple character. It seems to me that the reason is very simple. Their ”minds” have been much more simplified than Chinese characters had been in 1950s.

Last week, I asked two chinese students in MBA to write down for me " 筝 " the simplified second character of 古筝 (classic chinese musical instrument).

But I was very surprised to see that any of them could write the character. I had to show them this character on my Pleco dictionary.

They said that even if it's a simplified character only literature students would learn to write and use this kind of character. I was really shocked to ear this kind of statement coming from top chinese students.

I so agree with you, henning. But my student's learning difficulties are causing her a lot of distress at the moment, I am trying to walk a very fine line between not presuming to "diagnose" a disability which may not even exist, on the one hand; and on the other hand, trying to keep my mind open to a possibility which no Asian person wants to even consider, yet may be an important piece of information and wisdom concerning how the many people who love her so much (including me) can be totally supportive of her. It's not only the recent grades, there is a certain puzzling picture which has been building up for a number of years, as well as a few things which have been troubling me. Her mother and I are very close, partly because I don't pigeonhole her daughter the way so many of her teachers do/have done, and the daughter responds to my clumsy teaching in a way that I don't have a right to expect. It's just that I know -- instinctively -- that my student may have some special needs. At the moment I don't know what they are, I only have some hunches, and she deserves neutral, professional advice from an educational psychologist.

One has to be very careful never to confuse dyslexia with general mental capacity. I know of people suffering from severe dyslexia who have graduated from University with way above-average grades. More in the formal, less language-dependent subjects, of course.

The same is true for many other forms of "disorders". Also be aware that some seemingly severe "learning" or "concentration" impairments might be temporal.

Judging a person - even judging yourself - based on a few recent grades is all too easy.

Hi guys,

> her knowledge of any one language lacks

> the intellectual depth of a true first language

(by auntie68)

Thanks a lot for your very interesting discussion, which gave me a good opportunity to think about so-called “bilingual people” again. Some of my friends here in China are educated Korean-Chinese, and they speak both Chinese and Korean fluently. I thought they were “bilingual” when I first came to China several years ago, but in fact they are NOT bilingual.

They speak excellent Chinese for “foreign learners”, but their proficiency is actually not nearly as good as that of native 汉族人, and their knowledge about Chinese language is also not deep enough to be called “educated native speakers.” On the contrary, I sometimes feel (or suspect) that even their Korean, their mother tongue, slightly fall short of standards of a native language.

They often don’t know how to say a big word (or a simple technical word) in Korean, but they sometimes know its counterpart in Chinese, and vice versa. I think that both languages are, in a sense, complementary to each other for Korean-Chinese people here. This is fairly understandable to me because they don’t have sufficient exposure to their own language as long as they live here in China.

They usually speak Korean at home and school, but most TV programs, very important linguistic resources for children, are of course broadcasted in Chinese. You can’t find much books and magazines in Korean, especially when my Korean-Chinese friends were young. Looks like it’s tough to be “a bilingual.” Aunti68’s remark just reminds me of an English saying, Jack of all trades, master of none.

My student's official "1st language" is English, and her "second language" is Mandarin, because her parents enrolled her in the local (i.e. Singaporean) school system rather than in an international school. I think this may be the only country in Asia where expat parents don't have to be particularly brave or radical to consider the local system.

Their reasons for doing so are pretty complex; essentially they have settled here permanently. The Ministry of Education (MOE) is very experienced in placing foreign kids and reintegrating citizens who are "returning Singaporeans" who spent part of their education outside the country. Since she had been born and raised here, and also since both of her parents were fluent in English, MOE encouraged them to give her a shot in a 100% mainstream programme (EL1 + either CL2 or ML2 or TL2). Parents chose CL2 -- Mandarin -- because they thought it would be more relevant to a life partly lived in Italy and Japanese, than Malay or Tamil. At the time, no other second languages were available at elementary school level (since then they've added Hindi). We simply don't have the resources to offer Italian or Japanese to elementary school students.

The first years in elementary school were very smooth, with no signs of trouble either with English or Mandarin. Somewhere in Primary Three, she started falling behind her classmates; really struggling. Curiously, at one point her best subject was Mandarin (CL2), with hindsight I now think that it was because it was being taught at a much lower level than any other school subject.

I am going to go away now with all the insights that you guys have given me in this thread, and reflect on how best to help my student. If anything, you've given me a little bit of a "push" to listen to my own instincts. Eg. a few weeks ago, I actually called up a friend who is an educational psychologist. My own mother, who is an active teacher with 40 years' experience, teaching girls who are my student's age now, was the one who suggested to me that. To my fuzzy layman brain, my student's biggest problem is that she seems to be extremely weak at processing information and retaining it.

wolson:

I suspect that trying to see if you can find the character in your dictionary first by guessing the sound is less "mechanical" -- and more intuitive -- than looking up the entry in the usual way. Good luck!

tvan, dennisliehappo:

The points you each made absolutely stopped me in my tracks because I just KNOW that you're right.

The more "pc" way (in Singapore) of labelling what Dennis described as being "a Nobody" is -- "third culture kid". She enjoys all three cultures (Italian, Japanese, Singaporean) but you're right, her knowledge of any one language lacks the intellectual depth of a true first language. It is possible that the "melting pot" nature of Singapore has mitigated -- and perhaps helped to hide from us -- some problems which might otherwise have raised a red flag or two along the way.

I guess I was the one who brought up the word "learning disability" in the first place, so my instincts are with both of you. Tvan, thank you so much for starting this thread, which started me thinking about the mysteries behind genuine learning disabilities, and their impact. My student almost didn't graduated from primary school, her younger sister has been identified -- by the same school system -- as a possible candidate for the gifted education. programme.

cont in next comment...

Auntie68,

I also will look up characters and also liik at the characters around the object one in the dictionary. I do not try to guess the sound of the character though. I should try that.

To Tvan and Auntie68, She could be dyslexic or she could be mildly retarded but I think that she is a "Nobody".

And with naming her a Nobody ,I don't mean to say that she is a loser ,a good for nothing as the word Nobody is normally used in English but she is a Nobody in the sense that she hasn't identified with one of the many languages and culture she knows.

She knows well enough Japanese, Italian and English language and their cultures to function in daily life but doesn't know them well enough to express her inner feelings.

Ha ha ha That is a good one AuntySue.

I am glad that you are back again.

Bbjt theory has nothing to do with Dyslexia in any language

bbjt, perhaps the face recognition connection is true but not universal. I don't think I'm dyslexic in Chinese, but I do have very bad memory for faces. Sometimes I don't recognise my own mother until she says something. But I'm a pretty average student of hanzi. Next time I get confused about some characters, though, I'll be sure to pull out that theory as my excuse!

bbjt, interesting. I an accountant, not an educational psychologist (psychiatrist?), but that, along with dennisliehappo's post, seems to support the idea that different parts of the brain decode characters versus alphabets.

auntie68, I have an older brother who is obviously mildly retarded. He possesses phenomenal memorization, reads college journals, and takes beautiful photos, but if you asked him what the automobile equivalent of a bicycle's handlebars (i.e. steering wheel), he'd answer. "brake pedal". Who knows why? He functions in society, that's what counts.

Also, since you've diverted my thread (hijacking is too strong a term), why does an Italian/Japanese have to learn Chinese? Why can't she learn Japanese... or Italian? Or does it have to be one of the official Singaporean languages?

People Dyslexic in Chinese have also a bad memory for faces (in french globish it's called bad physionomist).

There're different levels :

- do I know this person ?

- what's the name of this person ?

- from the name can I recall the face of this person ?

- can I draw this visage from memory ?

Hi tvan, memorizing the radical order is a big deal! If it helps, my experience is that you don't need to look everything up so formally; even the mere exercise of guessing the sound of the character and trying to find it by hanyu pinyin is a useful exercise (because you're taking an analytical look at the components of the character, even if only for a few seconds).

I've just read dennisliehappo's post, and would like to share that my student, a 12-year-old family friend whose parents are both foreign (Italian Dad, Japanese Mum), seems to have no problems whatsoever with Chinese characters -- or with speaking Mandarin -- but she seems to have a learning disability where hanyu pinyin is concerned.

I am not a qualified teacher, nor am I even very good at Mandarin, but I am reaching the view that she may have a genuine learning disability. Her problems with hanyu pinyin are keeping her Chinese grades in the "fail" zone because her ability to acquire new vocab depends on her being able to hear somebody say it, and then memorizing what she heard.

My student is not "taking the piss". In fact, she's incredibly hardworking and determined. I know this because she was consistently failing most of her school subjects last year, but after only three months of intensive coaching, she and I got her grades up to an "A" for English, and nothing less than a "C" for the other two subjects. We didn't do Mandarin then because her mother had applied for a temporary waiver of the 2nd Language subject requirement in order to let her concentrate on passing the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE).

Granted, I know that she has some emotional issues, but this morning I asked her mother (gulp!) to consider seeking the advice of an educational psychologist. In brief, I would say that there's nothing "slow" about my student, but she can't seem to process information in any meaningful sort of way. Eg. she can read an English text silently first, and then read it aloud for me -- with appropriate expression, and obvious understanding and enjoyment --, yet she wouldn't be able to answer any questions based on the text. We worked on this for two full months last year before she was able to score 20/25 consistently on the standard "comprehension" tests for her level (rather than 3 or 4/25). So I know she can do it, but it costs her so much effort that I think there may be a problem. Her spoken English is very fluent and correct. So is her written English, when she's doing "free composition" (in fact, it's well-structured), but she can't seem to get anything useful out of anything she reads. Chinese seems to be better for her, but she is failing that subject because there's virtually zero overlap between her reading, speaking, and writing ability in that language (just like it was in English, before we fixed that).

My gut feeling is that my student has an undiagnosed learning problem, connected with reading, which can be a severe disability depending on the subject. She's amiable and disciplined enough to be a class monitor, but this makes it difficult for her teachers to see a problem. I don't get it. When I first began teaching her, in July 2007, she was nearly illiterate in English because she couldn't spell at all, and her vocabulary was very, very small. But she wasn't mixing letters up; it's just that she seemed to be unable to size up words and learn how to spell them.

Tvan, sorry for hijacking your thread for a second time in one day!

Now i am becoming dyslexic

The last sentence must be thet they cannot function well in both languages

He is Duttch.

HIs Dutch and English are fine.

He only has Character Dyslexia, so he can't learn Chinese and Japanese using 漢字.

Chinese who have Character Dyslexia can function well in English.

But Chinese and Non-Chinese who both dyslexic and Character Dyslexic can function well in both English and Chinese.

Auntie68, I'm with you on looking up characters in a print dictionary both as a learning stratagem as well as, well, finding out what a word means. What I need to do now is follow Changye's advice and memorize all the radicals in order so that I can bypass the radical index.

dennisliehappo, interesting... so there really is such a thing as Chinese dyslexia. How was your friend's English? I'm asking because of some recent articles suggesting that people dyslexic in a English function well in Chinese. I wonder if the reverse is true?

Hi again. Wolson, I wish I were disciplined enough to write out new characters a few times!

I find that a good way (for me) to retain and internalize new Chinese characters, is to develop the habit of manually looking up a proportion of them in a traditional print dictionary. Say, 20 - 25% of the new characters I come across?

I suspect that those few seconds spent guessing a character's pronunciation based on its elements, and then looking it up alphabetically (or failing which, counting the strokes etc), are a great way to "fix" the character for me. It's as if the process of deconstructing the character does something useful.

Not only that, I also like to let my eyes wander briefly to the entries in the immediate vicinity of my "target" character. Since they are likely to be homonyms, it's like a subconscious tutorial on the way meaning and sound work together with each other in characters.

Just my 2 cents worth!

Trust me Tvan, you're NOT dyslexic.

I know this because a schoolmate of mine had Character Dyslexia and therefore he eventually had to stop with his study Chinese.

He could say everything in Chinese.

He could understand everything in Chinese.

He knew all the grammar.

He could read every text if it was written in Pinyin and all that he heard in Chinese he could write down in Pinyin.

But he couldn't learn the Chinese Characters and to pass the exams he had use the Characters, so he had to quite his study.

Not certain why my brain has stopped processing! Could have been this project that I working on for research ... it has been a political nightmare and has caused me a few sleepless nights ... I wished it were Chinese that was frying my brain ... at least then I would be flash-fried! :)

Ivan, everyone begins by trying to memorize characters ... it is ok for short term memory but for long term memory, it does not do the job. What I find works best is if I write the character a few times (using the rules for writing characters!) and then using the character in a couple of sentences. I no longer overtly try to memorize a character but rather try to become familiar with it like I would a new friend.

A great aide that I have found in is the "A Chinese-English Dictionary, A Basic Dictionary for CHinese Language Learning" published by the Foreign Language Press for sentences on how a word is used. I purchased this one that I have in Beijing and it has literally opened my eys on some usages. Another useful dictionary is " Cheng & Tsui Chinese Character Dictionary: A Guide to the 2,000 Most Frequently-Used Characters" published by Cheng & Tsui. This one has has large characters with individual stroke orders for writing the characters.

Hi tvan,

I remember that a brush calligraphy teacher at primary school once told me, about forty years ago, that I had to follow the correct stroke order so that I could write characters “beautifully”, but I believe that even a professional calligrapher actually often writes the way he wants, much less laymen!

There are two things I forgot to mention in the above post. How to write in the correct stroke order is not so important, at least you shouldn’t be overly bothered by that, but how to accurately count the number of strokes is important, otherwise you can’t look up a word in a dictionary quickly.

More importantly, you need to be proficient in finding the target character based on its radical, as early as possible, and it is not always easy even for native speakers. For example, which radical do you use when finding “舒” (shu1) in your dictionary? And what is the numbers of strokes of 凹 and 凸？

Hi tvan. In our school system, every subject is taught in English, except for the... "mother tongue", which is arbitrarily assigned based on race. Yuck. For 75% of young Singaporeans, this means studying a strange subject called "Chinese as a Second Language" (or "CL2"), or something slightly more challenging known as "Higher Chinese". But it's only one subject. A small number apply for, and receive, official permission to do Chinese at a lower level, the "B"-syllabus Chinese.

I totally agree with you and AuntySue about the strange treatment of dyslexia on that website. My layman's understanding of dyslexia tells me that "trying to read to your child at an early age" has no effect whatsoever on true dyslexia. The only explanation I can give is that we are feeling so overwhelmed at this moment with clinical medical diagnoses of autism and dyslexia and HDD, that we don't spend a lot of time exploring the notion of "Chinese dyslexia" properly...

Auntie68, if I recall correctly (I was once corrected on the subject), Singapore has four or five "official" languages with English more or less the lingua franca. Is every Singaporean child taught at least two languages? At a state school?

AuntieSue, I'm with you on the above definition. It seems to fall in the category of using a true problem (dyslexia) as an excuse.

That's an interesting attempt at a definition. When you think about it, all of those listed difficulties occur in English speaking learners of English, but we generally classify those listed reading problems outside of "dyslexia" which is rather more specific.

Maybe they are calling all reading problems faced by Chinese children (etc) dyslexia. It's a bit puzzling to my pedantic mind.

Eek, sorry, tvan, for the mild hi-jack. Thanks for the "softening" ;-)...

Thanks for drawing my attention to that web page's Singaporean origins. I've heard a few of those names before, and believe they are well-respected. "Chinese dyslexia" is a hotly-dispute hot topic in SIngapore at the moment. Some use the term ironically, some (mainly the educational psychologists and trained counsellors) think that the stunning rise in diagnoses of "Chinese dyslexia" may point to something deeper than the fact that Singaporeans are finding it more and more difficult to maintain -- let alone to transmit to their children -- any sort of Mandarin proficiency.

In recent years, the number of "English-dyslexia" cases recognized by our Ministry of Education has risen so quickly that they've assigned a "Special Needs" counsellor to every school! And because that's not nearly enough, the plan is for 10% of all the teachers to receive some kind of very basic certification in detecting dyslexia, autism, and ADD, as well in helping kids with very mild cases stay in school. It's mind-boggling; in this context, "Chinese dyslexia" is something which we haven't even begun to explore properly yet.

Hi auntie68,

Owing to you, I’m enjoying listening to a few beginner (1 and 2) lessons of Koreanclass a day recently. The way the hosts talk is really entertaining and friendly. Thanks!

Changye,

Thanks for the encouragement. Actually, I am hard at work at the only foreign (for me) language that has ever truly interested me. However, when I read the purported symptoms of "Chinese Dyslexia", I couldn't resist posting them here. Any offense to serious students of the language and/or people with actual dyslexia was purely accidental/coincidental/deliberate.

Yo, Auntie68. You hijacking my thread? ;) BTW, did you notice that the web site cited above originated in your beautiful city?

Changye, on stroke order, I've often wondered if that mattered more in calligraphy than casual writing.

Hello changye. At last, a post from you. Whee!! I almost regret telling you about KoreanClass101... how many KC101 lessons do you listen to each day? Please be honest with me...

Hi tvan,

I’m a native Japanese, therefore I basically don’t have difficulty to memorize the "shapes" of simplified Chinese characters. And for this reason, I always think highly of you guys who learn Chinese from scratch, which I really think is a challenge to your memory power. If I were you, I would soon give it up.

Now please let me give you some tips. Firstly, unless you would like to be a professional translator or a researcher, I don’t recommend you try to become able to write all the characters you have learned. What you need to do first is to memorize all the radicals and master a few hundred “basic” Chinese characters.

Secondly, you don’t have to worry about “the proper sequences of strokes”. There is only one rule for that, i.e. from the top to the bottom, and from left to right. Anyway, sometimes there are a few different sequences for one character, and even educated natives usually don’t much care about precise stroke orders.

Lastly, and fortunately, Chinese grammar is very easy to learn compared to some European languages, such as German, French, and Finnish. I guarantee that you would be able to make very fast progress in learning Chinese, once you have mastered a certain number of characters and phrases.

Good luck.

calkins, wolson, it's OK. The first step on the road to recovery is to to admit that you have a problem.

Of course, I've been admitting the above for quite a while. I'm waiting expectantly to learn the next step.

Hey Walt, I think the Chinese learning has fried the gears in your brain;) They're not moving in your avatar anymore. I think Chinese has done the same to my brain!

I definitely experience all of these symptoms. The biggest being that I mix up similar-looking characters.

I thought this was just normal when learning Chinese!