This is your brain on Chinese
boran
May 03, 2008, 02:23 PM posted in General Discussion<p>
An article in Friday's (May 2nd) <i>Wall Street Journal</i> discusses how reading activates different parts of the brain depending on the language. In particular, comparisons were made between Chinese and English. For example, Chinese focuses more on rote memorization thus the memory areas of our brain are much more active when reading Chinese than in English. A quote from the article:
<blockquote>"Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet..."
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</p>
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It doesn't get into discussing the scenario where a person is fluent in both languages. I'm curious how much the brain changes when acquiring literacy in a second language. It's a bit daunting realizing that you might need to change your brain chemistry in order to read Chinese but I guess that's one of the reasons I'm trying to learn it.
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Here's another interesting quote about just how different languages are to the brain:
<blockquote>
"It's very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English."
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<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120965705088459637.html">How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language</a>
steesen
May 03, 2008, 03:15 PMi think Chinese is planar character just as we say:方块字,that english just as linear character,i don't know if this connects with the article?
wei1xiao4
May 03, 2008, 10:33 PMYes, my husband told me about this article. But he said that the Chinese do not have dyslexia like so many US children do. Why do you think that is? So many of the characters look so similar to me that I often get confused. There was a great post a while back where similar characters were compared. Very helpful.
wei1xiao4
May 03, 2008, 10:47 PMYes, this was a very interesting article. So Chinese have a different kind of dyslexia from English readers and you can have dyslexia in one language but not another. This would explain a lot since I have a difficult time with many characters due to their similarities. Maybe I'm Chinese dyslexic...or just old!
AuntySue
May 03, 2008, 11:02 PMI agree it's fascinating and worthy of more research, but for the sake of "truth in news-mongering" I want to point out that all of this material had been known and discussed at some time before 1988 when I was taught about it in a cognitive psychology class. What's new is that it's been turned into a popular news item so everyone gets to hear and think about it.
bento
May 04, 2008, 02:55 AMI was first drawn into learning Chinese because an advertise stated that Chinese learning helped develop the right side of the brain. maybe it was just a silly excuse i need, but i always felt i couldn't dance properly because the right side of my brain was underdeveloped. Does anyone know whether Chinese people find dancing easier than we do?
wei1xiao4
May 04, 2008, 04:59 AMI do know that they love to dance. When I visited Guizhou, early every morning people would gather in the town square and play with tops and dance. One of my Chinese teachers tells me that she practices ballroom dancing each morning when she is in Shenzhen. Ballroom dancing competitions are very big here in HK.
kesirui
May 04, 2008, 05:11 AMBoran, Actually I have seen studies saying that dyslexia does not exist in China, and English (or western) speaking dyslexics have an easier time learning Chinese characters.
boran
May 04, 2008, 06:01 AMHi Kesirui, The article implies that you can have dyslexia in regards to Chinese but it doesn't go into details. In English, dyslexia refers to having a difficulty matching sounds with letters in the alphabet (among other things). Since Chinese characters are not exact phonetic representations of a word, I'm not sure what being dyslexic in Chinese means. Perhaps they have problems with character order. The article points out that dyslexia in English is a completely different neurological condition than dyslexia in Chinese since different parts of the brain are used in reading each language. So what we think of dyslexia from an English perspective is different than Chinese dyslexia. I think! I knew nothing about this until reading the article so I'm certainly no expert. It did get me searching and I found these regarding Chinese dyslexia: Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese? What is Chinese Dyslexia? Hey Wēixiào, from reading these symptoms for Chinese Dyslexia, I think I may be one too - or maybe I just need to study more!
boran
May 03, 2008, 02:23 PMAn article in Friday's (May 2nd) Wall Street Journal discusses how reading activates different parts of the brain depending on the language. In particular, comparisons were made between Chinese and English. For example, Chinese focuses more on rote memorization thus the memory areas of our brain are much more active when reading Chinese than in English. A quote from the article:
It doesn't get into discussing the scenario where a person is fluent in both languages. I'm curious how much the brain changes when acquiring literacy in a second language. It's a bit daunting realizing that you might need to change your brain chemistry in order to read Chinese but I guess that's one of the reasons I'm trying to learn it.
Here's another interesting quote about just how different languages are to the brain:
How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language