Reading Languages Explained Clearly

Today I'm going to talk about reading. Reading which is so important in language learning. It's a big part of learning things, learning about the world in general. Even though for most of uh human history, we didn't have writing. People didn't read. So people learned languages without making use of the ability to read. And even today, many people learn without reading. But to the extent that we use reading, there is a concept in reading or in relating the written text to the spoken text that is quite interesting and that is the concept of transparent languages and opaque languages. And we've all experienced the fact that in Spanish for example or in Turkish or in other languages, Italian, Finnish, Indonesian,

there is a onetoone relationship between how the word is written and how it's pronounced. It's consistent. Once you understand how those letters are used in that language, whenever you read, you can sound out the words even if you don't know the meaning of the words. Those languages are called transparent languages which where the writing system is not consistent. For example, English where you can have the letter combination o u g which can be bow through rough cough. That's not consistent. Uh there are many other examples put bug. In other words, u can have different values. In French there are silent letters. There are nasal sounds which are less obvious when we are reading and therefore make those languages more opaque. There are a

number of sounds in French which can be written in different ways to produce the same sound. So it's not obvious when we are hearing the language what the spelling is. So this affects our ability to spell the language but it also affects our ability to read because it makes that relationship between the audio and the written word less consistent. And where we have a transparent language apparently the written word once we decode that word it goes directly to a funological and audio sort of system in the brain. Whereas when we have languages that are more opaque not consistent we have to rely on additional resources. So on the one hand we do decode the word but because the pronunciation of the word of the same

combination of letters or different letters can vary we end up having to have an image of that word we learn or we memorize that word. Even in English if you uh see the word read depending on the tense it could be read it could be read. So there are a number of words like that in a number of languages where the way that word is pronounced is determined by the context. That's particularly true in say Arabic uh where we are often given sort of a core set of say three sounds and depending on the relationship to other words in that sentence it could be kub maktub. So again, connecting it to other words in the sentence in the context is going to determine how that is pronounced. All of that makes it more

difficult to read, to vocalize while reading, to figure out the meaning of the word while reading. And that's for example why I still rely on reading Arabic and Persian online. languages that I don't speak as well, say Polish, I can read on in a book, which I enjoy doing, miss a lot of words, but still I can make I can pronounce them all. Whereas in Arabic and Persian, that's much more difficult to do. So I rely on the online version to look things up, to hear it pronounced using text to speech and so forth. And if we look at the languages that I've learned, obviously Spanish, as I say, is very transparent. Uh Finnish as well, Turkish as well. And it's a pleasure because when I hear Turkish, I can almost see

the words. I know what the words are because I hear it. It's very clear. It's it's there's less energy expended to read and to connect audio to text and say Turkish or Spanish. In Portuguese, especially European Portuguese, there are vowels that are not pronounced. There are nasal sounds. All of this make it less obvious. It's not crystal clear as is the case with Spanish. In the case of Chinese, obviously, we have to memorize the characters. We have to it's not enough to hear it. We have to memorize the character and that means at least in the initial period having some understanding of the components of the character and strokes in the character. After a while though with enough practice enough listening and reading we do identify the

sound with the character. So many of these problems with so-called opaque languages with time with the same method that we use for learning transparent languages, in other words, lots of listening and reading is going to get you there. And if you enjoy doing it, you enjoy doing it. I tend to, for example, with opaque languages such as my Persian and Arabic, I will tend to use sentence mode at link more because I then get six, seven or eight words. I hear the natural sound, the audio of that sentence and I sometimes get lazy. So I rely on the audio and I'm not really putting the effort into reading that word. Uh however, because in everything we do, we want to vary what

we're doing. H language learning is sort of an iterative process. You got to try this, go do something else, come back. So I will vary my sentence mode with page mode because in page mode, I don't have the ability to hear. I don't get the momentum of listening to the text spoken by the native speaker. So, I read and I can tell that I'm getting better and better at reading in Persian and Arabic without the assist of sentence mode or audio. One thing about Persian and Arabic which makes it less transparent for me is that I don't use the little vowel indicators because in most cases they aren't available. So, I tend to ignore them. But again, Persian and Arabic are to my mind less transparent because even the letters

vary depending on their location in the word. You don't have these vowel markers where they do appear. The vowel markers seem to me like cluttered. And then of course the script is always somewhat cursive. So all of these things make it less transparent for me. And apparently languages that are opaque even you know native speakers of those languages spend more energy in reading in those languages because they can't directly connect to the audio. All of these things it's a matter of getting used to it. I can go on and on with examples with Korean, which for example is considered kind of transparent but slightly similar to Chinese in that the phonetic symbols in Korean are presented

in blocks and so our brain tends to see them as blocks much like the Chinese characters. So we're not aware of what our brains are doing. We are aware if some languages are easier to read than others. we are aware if we listen to an audio book in say Spanish in our minds I find I can connect that to the written language much more easily I can read that language much more easily whereas languages that are less transparent I find them a little more difficult but ultimately it's my motivation it's it's the process that is the reward and I don't mind putting in that extra bit of effort and I try to find you know a strategy that will enable me to continue to make progress and eventually I get better and better

And now I can read a full page, you know, in Arabic or Persian with a few words that I don't know. And I look forward to the day when I will be able to read that language in a book without being online. But I'm not there yet. Uh, for some reason, I found Chinese easier because there's a finite number. I shouldn't say a finite number, but once you know the characters, you know what they are, you can read. Whereas with our personal I find that interconnection with the remainder of the text and the way certain symbols can sometimes be a consonant and sometimes be a vowel. So if you don't know the word at least for me I find it difficult to pronounce the word and therefore difficult to read those words. Now the

fact that you know there are languages which are more opaque that uh for example in French uh you know you hear a sound o to banto t o t bo b e a u or b a u x in plural uh you know there are a number of examples I won't go through them all and so that does make it a little more difficult but I love French and many people do uh and uh so that's part of what you have to get used to. In every language we learn, the letters typically are used in a way that's different from what we're used to. So in Czech, for example, the re e is pronounced dj for well where the same word in Polish is pronounced dubj.

Apparently it used to be so pardon my check. And this is true in every language. you get used to how for example in the Russian you know you say malaco per milk I think whereas in Ukraine it would be moco so that they don't sort of get the sort of subdued vowels for the longest time when I was reading Russian I would pronounce what is looks like a p I would pronounce it as p whereas in fact in Russian it's r so all these things we have to get used to them we get used to them by going over and over the same material in different forms listening sentence mode uh you know page mode difficult content, easier content, constantly browsing to re, you know, acquaint ourselves. As Jeffrey Hinton said, every exposure to

the language is a form of regenerating and renewing this web of connections in our brain. It's not sort of having something explained to us. This letter is this. It's not enough. I spent a lot of time trying to learn the Arabic alphabet, but until I have had enough exposure, then I'm not used to it. And it's all a matter of getting used to it repeatedly regenerating these connections in our brains so that eventually we are able to again as an AI anticipate the next word plan the next utterance and so that the differences or the difficulty of opaque languages versus transparent languages is not an obstacle to learning. It just means that our path is going to be different for different languages and it's up to us as

learners to try and find the one that works the best for us and for that language. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.